Neuroecologia de aves da família charadriidae: estudos arquitetônicos, estereológicos e filogenéticos

Abstract

The species Charadrius semipalmatus and Charadrius collaris are from the Plovers group (Charadriidae Family). These species are migratory and non-migratory birds, respectively. In the migratory birds, the hippocampus is important to recover memories related to the stopping places, details about the breeding and the wintering grounds. The hippocampus plays an important role the processing of spatial memory in these organisms, making them excellent models to investigate the effect of behavior in this brain region.This work aims to investigate whether the hippocampal adaptive responses to migratory behavior are related to the migration and/or evolutionary pattern between migrant and non-migrant species of Charadrius genus. The individuals of C. collaris and C. semipalmatus were collected in islands of the coast using mist nets. The birds were measured, anesthetized, identified at species level using morphological features, had samples of muscle tissue collected and were transcardially perfused. The brain was cut in the coronal plane, the sections were stained by the Nissl technique and immunolabelled for NeuN, DCX and C-fos.Cell numbers, hippocampal volume and cell volume were estimated through the Optical Fractionator, Cavalieri Estimator and Nucleator, respectively. The total DNA was extracted for subsequent sequencing of the cytochrome oxidase c subunit I fragment (COI) to generate phylogenetic trees of Bayesian inference, maximum likelihood, genetic distance measurements and analyzes of phylogenetic independent contrasts. The results showed that the anatomy of the hippocampal formations observed in C. semipalmatus and C. collaris corroborate that observed for birds in general.The stereological results evidenced that the migratory species had higher volume of hippocampal formation, number of mature neurons and neurogenesis, when compared to non-migratory species, however there was no difference in the volume of neurons and C-fos positive cells. Molecular results showed no correlation between the characteristics of the hippocampal formation and the evolutionary distances between migrant and non-migrant birds, indicating that the differences in the number of cells as well as the volume of hippocampal formation do not occur due to the phylogenetic distance between the species. Therefore, the existence of neuroanatomic differences in the hippocampal formation of migrant birds is evident, excluding evolutionary factors as responsible for these architectural arrangements.