Coexisting guild members with ecomorphological differences may, however, not always have clearly separated niches, but are likely to have similar preferences and exploit the same resources, at least opportunistically

or during certain parts of the year if resources are not limited (Nummi, 1993; Guillemain et al., 2002). In migratory species exploiting seasonally Ulixertinib nmr changing environments, resource limitation may occur only during some periods of the annual cycle, or even in some years only. Accordingly, on an annual basis, different species may show a high overlap in food resource use during some seasons. However, we did not find a significant effect of season. If competition does indeed increase during winter, when ducks tend to aggregate, a greater reduction in food overlap would have been expected (see Guillemain et al., Idasanutlin nmr 2002). We argue that the observed differences in average seed size in the diet of the three studied species are a result of different lamellar density. The patterns of food size separation between the three species are compatible with the idea of coexistence under interspecific competition, a process that has long created harsh debate (e.g. Roughgarden, 1983). Our study thus supports the idea that interspecific competition may indeed be a structuring force in dabbling duck communities in the Western Palearctic, even if only intermittently

so. We are thankful to M.-S. Landry for helping us retrieving European duck diet studies, and to M. Sanchez and V. Schricke for kindly providing their own unpublished data. We thank J. W. H. Ferguson and an anonymous reviewer for constructive criticism on the manuscript. A.-L. Brochet was funded

by a Doctoral grant from Office National de la Chasse et de la Faune Sauvage, with additional funding from a research agreement between ONCFS, the Tour du Valat, Laboratoire de Biométrie et de Biologie Evolutive (UMR 5558 CNRS Université Lyon 1) and the Doñana Biological Station (CSIC). L. Dessborn and J. Elmberg were funded by grants V-98-04 and V-162-05 from the Swedish Environmental Protection medchemexpress Agency. “
“Science progresses through ideas or hypotheses; novel ways of viewing the world. If those ideas survive testing, then they are considered ‘the truth’, or more crucially, truth-for-now, for the essence of science is that if a new idea provides a better explanation of the way the world is, the truth changes. Darwin’s idea of evolution by natural selection, published as the Origin in 1859, replaced the earlier truth of physico- or natural-theology introduced by John Ray in 1691. Despite resistance by the church, Darwin’s truth gained widespread acceptance, in part due to the efforts of T. H. Huxley, who on reading the Origin said ‘How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!’ Despite natural selection’s enormous explanatory power, there were certain phenomena it apparently could not explain, including female promiscuity.