In the current era of rapid and extreme climate change organisms are increasingly facing hostile environments. We argue that group-living and cooperative breeding are strategies which enable animals to adapt to poor and unpredictable environmental conditions, and thus persist where otherwise they couldn’t. This project will investigate this hypothesis in a natural avian population, determining if sociality increases in response to severe conditions, whether this increases seasonal reproductive output, and also decreases variance in that output across seasons. Finally, result from this project will tell whether sociality facilitates adaptation to extreme and unpredictable changes in the environment.

The timing of light exposure, physical activity, and food intake are important cues for synchronising the biological clock. Disruption of the biological clock is a clear threat to both public health and vulnerable ecosystems. Especially in a highly industrialised country such as The Netherlands there is a mismatch between biological clocks and social demands. However, these cues have drastically – and abruptly - changed in our modern society due to the widespread use of artificial light and the round-the-clock demand for goods and services. Fundamental research has shown that precisely these conditions cause desynchrony among clock cells.