Bart Kempenaers

1 Introduction Studying historical and contemporary selection acting on genomes in wild populations can provide insight into the evolutionary trajectories of these populations and species. Comparative between-species studies can detect strong single or potentially long episodes of recurrent positive selection within the phylogenetic history of the analysed species, whereas population-based approaches are designed to detect recent or ongoing positive selection (Gao 2024).

Introduction Predators of ground-nesting birds use a variety of cues to locate nests, including visual, olfactory, and acoustic signals. However, we have limited knowledge of the exact mechanism of how predators find nests (Vickery et al. 1992, Pelech et al. 2010, Ibáñez-Álamo et al. 2015).

1 INTRODUCTION In birds, eggs typically hatch after a period of incubation by one or both parents. However, for various reasons, hatching may fail. For example, eggs may fail to develop as a result of male or female infertility (Santema et al., 2020), or the embryo may die at an early stage due to genetic defects (Briskie & Mackintosh, 2004; Cordero et al., 2004; Heber & Briskie, 2010) or because of chemical pollution (Assersohn et al., 2021; Janssens et al., 2003).