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Habitat-specific foraging strategies in Australasian gannets
Knowledge of top predator foraging adaptability is imperative for predicting their biological response to environmental variability. While seabirds have developed highly specialised techniques to locate prey, little is known about intraspecific variation in foraging strategies with many studies deri...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Company of Biologists Ltd
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4958272/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27305927 http://dx.doi.org/10.1242/bio.018085 |
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author | Wells, Melanie R. Angel, Lauren P. Arnould, John P. Y. |
author_facet | Wells, Melanie R. Angel, Lauren P. Arnould, John P. Y. |
author_sort | Wells, Melanie R. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Knowledge of top predator foraging adaptability is imperative for predicting their biological response to environmental variability. While seabirds have developed highly specialised techniques to locate prey, little is known about intraspecific variation in foraging strategies with many studies deriving information from uniform oceanic environments. Australasian gannets (Morus serrator) typically forage in continental shelf regions on small schooling prey. The present study used GPS and video data loggers to compare habitat-specific foraging strategies at two sites of contrasting oceanographic regimes (deep water near the continental shelf edge, n=23; shallow inshore embayment, n=26), in south-eastern Australia. Individuals from the continental shelf site exhibited pelagic foraging behaviours typical of gannet species, using local enhancement to locate and feed on small schooling fish; in contrast only 50% of the individuals from the inshore site foraged offshore, displaying the typical pelagic foraging strategy. The remainder adopted a strategy of searching sand banks in shallow inshore waters in the absence of conspecifics and other predators for large, single prey items. Furthermore, of the individuals foraging inshore, 93% were male, indicating that the inshore strategy may be sex-specific. Large inter-colony differences in Australasian gannets suggest strong plasticity in foraging behaviours, essential for adapting to environmental change. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4958272 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | The Company of Biologists Ltd |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-49582722016-08-04 Habitat-specific foraging strategies in Australasian gannets Wells, Melanie R. Angel, Lauren P. Arnould, John P. Y. Biol Open Research Article Knowledge of top predator foraging adaptability is imperative for predicting their biological response to environmental variability. While seabirds have developed highly specialised techniques to locate prey, little is known about intraspecific variation in foraging strategies with many studies deriving information from uniform oceanic environments. Australasian gannets (Morus serrator) typically forage in continental shelf regions on small schooling prey. The present study used GPS and video data loggers to compare habitat-specific foraging strategies at two sites of contrasting oceanographic regimes (deep water near the continental shelf edge, n=23; shallow inshore embayment, n=26), in south-eastern Australia. Individuals from the continental shelf site exhibited pelagic foraging behaviours typical of gannet species, using local enhancement to locate and feed on small schooling fish; in contrast only 50% of the individuals from the inshore site foraged offshore, displaying the typical pelagic foraging strategy. The remainder adopted a strategy of searching sand banks in shallow inshore waters in the absence of conspecifics and other predators for large, single prey items. Furthermore, of the individuals foraging inshore, 93% were male, indicating that the inshore strategy may be sex-specific. Large inter-colony differences in Australasian gannets suggest strong plasticity in foraging behaviours, essential for adapting to environmental change. The Company of Biologists Ltd 2016-06-15 /pmc/articles/PMC4958272/ /pubmed/27305927 http://dx.doi.org/10.1242/bio.018085 Text en © 2016. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Wells, Melanie R. Angel, Lauren P. Arnould, John P. Y. Habitat-specific foraging strategies in Australasian gannets |
title | Habitat-specific foraging strategies in Australasian gannets |
title_full | Habitat-specific foraging strategies in Australasian gannets |
title_fullStr | Habitat-specific foraging strategies in Australasian gannets |
title_full_unstemmed | Habitat-specific foraging strategies in Australasian gannets |
title_short | Habitat-specific foraging strategies in Australasian gannets |
title_sort | habitat-specific foraging strategies in australasian gannets |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4958272/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27305927 http://dx.doi.org/10.1242/bio.018085 |
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