DOI: 10.25338/b8ws5c
title: Chemical profiles of Leach's storm-petrel (Oceanodroma leucorhoa) feathers collected on Bon Portage Island, Nova Scotia, Canada

description: Avian chemical communication, once largely overlooked, is a growing field
 that has revealed the important role that olfaction plays in the social
 lives of some birds. Leach’s storm-petrels (Oceanodroma leucorhoa) have a
 remarkable sense of smell and a strong, musky scent. This long-lived,
 monogamous seabird relies on olfaction for nest relocation and foraging,
 but whether they use scent for communication is less well studied. They
 are nocturnally active at the breeding colony and yet successfully reunite
 with their mate despite poor night-vision, indicating an important role
 for non-visual communication. We investigated the chemical profiles of
 Leach’s storm-petrels to determine whether there is socially relevant
 information encoded in their plumage odor. To capture the compounds
 comprising their strong scent, we developed a method to study the
 compounds present in the air surrounding their feathers using headspace
 stir bar sorptive extraction coupled with gas-chromatography
 mass-spectrometry. We collected feathers from Leach’s storm-petrels
 breeding on Bon Portage Island in Nova Scotia, Canada in both 2015 and
 2016. Our method detected 142 commonly occurring compounds. We found
 interannual differences in chemical profiles between the two sampling
 years. Males and females had similar chemical profiles, while individuals
 had distinct chemical signatures across the two years. These findings
 suggest that the scent of the Leach’s storm-petrel provides sociochemical
 information that could facilitate olfactory recognition of individuals and
 may inform mate choice decisions.  
description: The data were generated using gas chromatography-mass
 spectrometry (GC-MS) to measure chemicals in headspace of feathers
 collected from Leach’s storm-petrels (<i>Oceanodroma
 leucorhoa</i>) breeding on Bon Portage Island in Nova Scotia,
 Canada. In total, 30 individuals were sampled across 2015 and 2016. For
 each bird, 3 replicate samples consisting of 2 feathers each were
 processed in each year. The 30 individuals were equally split between the
 two sexes with 15 females and 15 males. We used these data to determine
 whether socially-relevant information that could inform chemical
 communication is encoded in the chemical profiles of this
 species. To generate the chemical profile of each
 individual, we measured the peak areas of 127 compounds using Agilent
 MassHunter Quantitative Analysis Software Version B.08.00 for GC-MS. Each
 sample was analyzed with an added internal standard of known volume and
 concentration; 0.5 ml of 10ppm naphthalene-d8 in 100% ethanol. We measured
 the peak area of this compound in every sample to account for variation in
 instrument sensitivity. We standardized the chemical data by dividing each
 compound peak by the area of the internal standard in the corresponding
 run. To account for differences in feather quantity, we performed a second
 standardization where we divided by the pre-extraction feather sample
 mass. The standardized data are provided here. The data
 were analyzed using the PRIMER v 7.0.13 software package with the
 PERMANOVA+ v1 add-on (www.primer-e.com). First, the data were log(x+1)
 transformed to reduce the influence of the most abundant compounds. We
 used a combination of Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCO) plots to
 visualize our data, as well as two types of distance-based multivariate
 statistics: PERMANOVA and Canonical Analysis of Principal Coordinates
 (CAP) to analyze the patterns in our data. All these methods can be found
 in the PRIMER program. The specific details of each analysis are provided
 in the corresponding publication.
description: There are two files included in this dataset:
 
 Jennings_Ebeler_2020_chemicalprofiles_30birds.csv
 This file lists the abundance of 127 compounds for
 180 feather samples analyzed from 30 Leach’s storm-petrels across two
 sampling years, 2015 and 2016. 
 Jennings_Ebeler_chemicalprofiles_modelvalidationsamples.csv This file lists the abundance of 127 compounds for additional feathers analyzed from a subset of 9 individuals where we obtained and analyzed an extra sample. These data were used for validating Canonical Analysis of Principal Coordinate models. Please see the ReadMe file for further details.