migrating | Common News Update

Nov. 17 (UPI) -- Want to live a long and healthy life? Experts in human longevity often stress the importance of staying active. But new research suggests more sedentary animals -- species that stay put, avoiding long distance travel -- enjoy comparatively longer lifespans. Advertisement The findings, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, suggest animal species that migrate tend to "live fast and die young." For the study, scientists at the University of Exeter analyzed the development patterns and lifespans of some 1,300 mammal and bird species. They found species that migrate develop faster, reproduce earlier and generally live shorter lives than their more stationary peers. Their analysis may explain why many migratory species are on the decline. "Many species migrat...

Jan. 9 (UPI) -- According to a new study that combined the observations of citizen scientists and weather radar stations, some 2 billion birds cross the Gulf of Mexico during the spring migration season. "We looked at data from thousands of eBird observers and 11 weather radar stations along the Gulf Coast from 1995 to 2015," Kyle Horton, a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, said in a news release. "We calculated that an average of 2.1 billion birds crosses the entire length the Gulf Coast each spring as they head north to their breeding grounds. Until now, we could only guess at the overall numbers from surveys done along small portions of the shoreline." Observations of birds by citizen scientists, documented on the Cornell Lab-managed app eBird, helped scientists ca...

Tag: migrating

Migrating species tend to ‘live fast and die young’

Citizen scientists, radar systems count 2B birds migrating across the Gulf of Mexico