My research interests focus on how organisms cope with the environment in which they live. The current work centres on marine and oak forest habitats as well as the environment animals encounter in captivity. One system I work with to address this broad interest are seabirds, and gulls in particular. We pursue currently a range of interests on the breeding ecology of seabirds and how they interact with their environment. A main focus at the moment is the use of seabirds as monitors of the marine environment such as great skuas and pollution in Faroese and a range of seabird species using coastal shallow waters in the West of Scotland and Northern Ireland. One area of interest is to characterise spatio-temporal variation in resource use by gulls using feather stable isotopes. We also look at the influences of seabirds on environmental change and connectivity between marine and grazing habitat on crofted islands.
Selected Publications
Vallarino, A., Evans, N., Daunt, F., Wanless, S., and Nager, R. (2012) Egg components vary independently of each other in the facultative siblicidal Black-legged Kittiwake Rissa tridactyla. Journal of Ornithology, 153 (2). pp. 513-523. ISSN 2193-7192 (doi:10.1007/s10336-011-0772-4)
Verboven, N., Monaghan, P., Nager, R. G., and Evans, N. P. (2010) The effect of maternal state on the steroid and macronutrient content of lesser black-backed gull eggs. Physiological and Biochemical Zoology, 83 (6). pp. 1009-1022. ISSN 1522-2152 (doi:10.1086/656568)
Kim, M., Furness, R.W., and Nager, R.G. (2010) Hatching asynchrony is constrained by parental nest attendance during laying. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 64 (7). pp. 1087-1097. ISSN 0340-5443 (doi:10.1007/s00265-010-0923-2)
Bogdanova, M.I., and Nager, R.G. (2008) Sex-specific costs of hatching last: an experimental study on herring gulls (Larus argentatus). Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 62 (10). pp. 1533-1541. ISSN 0340-5443 (doi:10.1007/s00265-008-0582-8)
Verboven, N., Monaghan, P., Evans, D., Schwabl, H., Evans, N., Whitelaw, C., and Nager, R. (2003) Maternal condition, yolk androgens and offspring performance: a supplemental feeding experiment in the lesser black-backed gull (Larus fuscus). Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B: Biological Sciences, 270 . pp. 2223-2232. ISSN 0962-8452 (doi:10.1098/rspb.2003.2496)