Symposium number: 36

Title: COPING WITH SEASONAL CHALLENGES: THE ROLE AND REGULATION OF MOLT

Principal organizer: Barbara Helm
Max-Planck-Institute for Ornithology, Von-der-Tann Str. 7, D - 82346 Andechs, Germany
email: helm@orn.mpg.de

Second organizer: Les Underhill
Avian Demography Unit, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa

First keynote speaker: Ian Newton
Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Monks Wood, Abbots Ripton, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire PE28 2LS, Great Britain
Title of first keynote paper: The position of the molt in the annual cycle

Second keynote speaker: Anders Hedenström
Department of Animal Ecology, Ecology Building, Lund University, 223 62 Lund, Sweden
Title of second keynote paper: On feather quality, molt and migration

Contributed talks

Symposium description: Molt is an obligatory part of avian life, and uniquely involved in bird flight. As such, finding a suitable time and place to molt is a major challenge for birds. Avian solutions to this problem have far-reaching consequences for most aspects of ornithology, in particular for the study of reproduction, migration, energetics and flight mechanics. Although molt has long been known to be a crucial stage in the life cycle, its full implications are only just beginning to be explored. Exciting new developments are now emerging from a variety of perspectives, including ecology, life-history theory, flight mechanics, physiology, statistical theory, and annual timing research. This symposium aims to bring together expertise from such different fields towards gaining a fuller understanding of the processes and selection pressures that shape molting under the knock-on effects of annual cycles.

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