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Large-scale climatic anomalies affect marine predator foraging behaviour and demography.

ABSTRACT: Determining the links between the behavioural and population responses of wild species to environmental variations is critical for understanding the impact of climate variability on ecosystems. Using long-term data sets, we show how large-scale climatic anomalies in the Southern Hemisphere affect the foraging behaviour and population dynamics of a key marine predator, the king penguin. When large-scale subtropical dipole events occur simultaneously in both subtropical Southern Indian and Atlantic Oceans, they generate tropical anomalies that shift the foraging zone southward. Consequently the distances that penguins foraged from the colony and their feeding depths increased and the population size decreased. This represents an example of a robust and fast impact of large-scale climatic anomalies affecting a marine predator through changes in its at-sea behaviour and demography, despite lack of information on prey availability. Our results highlight a possible behavioural mechanism through which climate variability may affect population processes.

SUBMITTER: Bost CA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4639794 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Large-scale climatic anomalies affect marine predator foraging behaviour and demography.

Bost Charles A CA Cotté Cedric C Terray Pascal P Barbraud Christophe C Bon Cécile C Delord Karine K Gimenez Olivier O Handrich Yves Y Naito Yasuhiko Y Guinet Christophe C Weimerskirch Henri H

Nature communications 20151027

Determining the links between the behavioural and population responses of wild species to environmental variations is critical for understanding the impact of climate variability on ecosystems. Using long-term data sets, we show how large-scale climatic anomalies in the Southern Hemisphere affect the foraging behaviour and population dynamics of a key marine predator, the king penguin. When large-scale subtropical dipole events occur simultaneously in both subtropical Southern Indian and Atlanti ...[more]

PMID: 26506134

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Project description:BackgroundThe heterogeneous oceanographic conditions of continental shelf ecosystems result in a three-dimensionally patchy distribution of prey available to upper-trophic level predators. The association of bio-physical conditions with movement patterns of large marine predators has been demonstrated in diverse taxa. However, obtaining subsurface data that are spatio-temporally relevant to the decisions made by benthically-foraging species can be challenging.MethodsBetween 2009 and 2015, grey seals were captured on Sable Island, Nova Scotia, Canada during summer and fall and instrumented with high-resolution archival GPS tags. These tags recorded location data as well as depth (m), temperature (°C), and light level measurements during dives, until animals returned to the haulout site to breed. Hidden Markov models were used to predict apparent foraging along movement tracks for 79 individuals (59 females, 20 males) every 3 h. In situ measurements were used to estimate chlorophyll-a concentration (mg?m-?3) and temperature within the upper-water column (50?m) and temperature and depth at the bottom of dives. As chlorophyll-a could only be estimated from 10:00 to 14:00 AST for dive depths ?50?m, we formulated two generalized linear mixed-effects models to test the association of predicted grey seal behavioural states with oceanographic conditions and phytoplankton biomass: the first representing conditions of the upper-water column likely to influence primary productivity, and a second model including environmental conditions encountered by grey seals at the bottom of dives, when seals were more likely to be foraging.ResultsPredicted grey seal behavioural states were associated with fine-scale chlorophyll-a concentrations and other environmental conditions they encountered across the continental shelf. In the Water Column Model, season had no influence on the probability of observing apparent foraging, but chlorophyll-a, upper-water column temperature, and sex did, with females having a greater probability of foraging than males. In the Bottom Conditions Model, again season had no influence on the probability of apparent foraging, but females were over twice as likely as males to be foraging.ConclusionsThe results of this study highlight the value of in situ measurements of oceanographic properties that can be collected at high temporal resolution by animal-borne data loggers. These data provide insight into how inferred behavioural decisions made by large marine predators, such as the grey seal, may be influenced by fine-scale oceanographic conditions.

Dataset Information

Large-scale climatic anomalies affect marine predator foraging behaviour and demography.

Publications

Large-scale climatic anomalies affect marine predator foraging behaviour and demography.

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