In the past, harvest for food and feathers took many seabird species to low numbers, as evidenced by the demise of great auks and short-tailed albatross. Because killing of birds is relatively easy to control, most countries have stopped large scale harvest through regulation, and social pressure. The current threats to seabirds are more indirect and complex. For example, many species of penguins are rapidly declining and even with the best management, climate change may be too rapid for many populations to survive. The challenge before us is how to mitigate human impacts in the face of unprecedented increases in consumption and population.
Management is one of the few tools that can help.
Because of the scale and rapidity of effect, it is increasingly important to concentrate on improving colony habitats for seabirds as well as zoning large areas of the ocean so as to reduce conflicts with humans. The aim of this talk is to introduce some of the current areas of debate in the field of sexual selection. Staffan Bensch Molecular Population Biology Lab Department of Animal Ecology Lund University Lund, Sweden Molecular methods to study population divergence - the first steps of speciation Analysis of mitochondrial DNA often fails to distinguish between populations that otherwise differ in morphology or behaviour, traits that presumably have a genetic basis. I will exemplify how PCR based methods to study multiple genetic regions can be used to identify subtle genetic differences between recently diverged populations. I will focus on two questions.