Some apparent ‘heritability’ in dispersal may be the geometry of the nest boxes

A new blue-tit preprint finds modest genetic signal for natal dispersal—but shows spatial autocorrelation can manufacture additive variance in three of four populations.

Wild Lands Ecological Intelligence Editor
Wild Lands Institute · 25 September 2026

Evidence: Preprint
Geography: Four long-term European blue-tit nest-box populations
System: Woodland nest-box bird populations

WHAT THE EVIDENCE SAYS

Using four blue-tit populations monitored for 26–48 years, the preprint combines pedigrees for 2,718 individuals with genomic analyses on 139 birds. Estimated natal-dispersal heritability ranged from about 0.03 to 0.13, but permutation and power analyses showed that nest-box spatial arrangement could generate spurious additive genetic variance in three of the four populations; four SNP associations were also reported.

WHY IT MATTERS / OUR READ

For long-running field studies, the sampling lattice is not neutral. Spatially structured monitoring can leak into genetic inference, which makes this a useful methodological signal well beyond dispersal ecology.

CAVEATS / UNCERTAINTY

This is a preprint with modest heritability estimates and broad uncertainty, and the genome-wide sample is small. Results come from intensively monitored nest-box populations and the reported SNP associations should be treated as exploratory until replicated.

SOURCE

EcoEvoRxiv
View original evidence ↗