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Individuality counts: A new comprehensive approach to foraging strategies of a tropical marine predator

Foraging strategies are of great ecological interest, as they have a strong impact on the fitness of an individual and can affect its ability to cope with a changing environment. Recent studies on foraging strategies show a higher complexity than previously thought due to intraspecific variability....

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Autores principales: Schwarz, Jonas F. L., Mews, Sina, DeRango, Eugene J., Langrock, Roland, Piedrahita, Paolo, Páez-Rosas, Diego, Krüger, Oliver
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7882564/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33491108
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-04850-w
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author Schwarz, Jonas F. L.
Mews, Sina
DeRango, Eugene J.
Langrock, Roland
Piedrahita, Paolo
Páez-Rosas, Diego
Krüger, Oliver
author_facet Schwarz, Jonas F. L.
Mews, Sina
DeRango, Eugene J.
Langrock, Roland
Piedrahita, Paolo
Páez-Rosas, Diego
Krüger, Oliver
author_sort Schwarz, Jonas F. L.
collection PubMed
description Foraging strategies are of great ecological interest, as they have a strong impact on the fitness of an individual and can affect its ability to cope with a changing environment. Recent studies on foraging strategies show a higher complexity than previously thought due to intraspecific variability. To reliably identify foraging strategies and describe the different foraging niches they allow individual animals to realize, high-resolution multivariate approaches which consider individual variation are required. Here we dive into the foraging strategies of Galápagos sea lions (Zalophus wollebaeki), a tropical predator confronted with substantial annual variation in sea surface temperature. This affects prey abundance, and El Niño events, expected to become more frequent and severe with climate change, are known to have dramatic effects on sea lions. This study used high-resolution measures of depth, GPS position and acceleration collected from 39 lactating sea lion females to analyze their foraging strategies at an unprecedented level of detail using a novel combination of automated broken stick algorithm, hierarchical cluster analysis and individually fitted multivariate hidden Markov models. We found three distinct foraging strategies (pelagic, benthic, and night divers), which differed in their horizontal, vertical and temporal distribution, most likely corresponding to different prey species, and allowed us to formulate hypotheses with regard to adaptive values under different environmental scenarios. We demonstrate the advantages of our multivariate approach and inclusion of individual variation to reliably gain a deeper understanding of the adaptive value and ecological relevance of foraging strategies of marine predators in dynamic environments. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00442-021-04850-w.
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spelling pubmed-78825642021-02-25 Individuality counts: A new comprehensive approach to foraging strategies of a tropical marine predator Schwarz, Jonas F. L. Mews, Sina DeRango, Eugene J. Langrock, Roland Piedrahita, Paolo Páez-Rosas, Diego Krüger, Oliver Oecologia Behavioral Ecology–Original Research Foraging strategies are of great ecological interest, as they have a strong impact on the fitness of an individual and can affect its ability to cope with a changing environment. Recent studies on foraging strategies show a higher complexity than previously thought due to intraspecific variability. To reliably identify foraging strategies and describe the different foraging niches they allow individual animals to realize, high-resolution multivariate approaches which consider individual variation are required. Here we dive into the foraging strategies of Galápagos sea lions (Zalophus wollebaeki), a tropical predator confronted with substantial annual variation in sea surface temperature. This affects prey abundance, and El Niño events, expected to become more frequent and severe with climate change, are known to have dramatic effects on sea lions. This study used high-resolution measures of depth, GPS position and acceleration collected from 39 lactating sea lion females to analyze their foraging strategies at an unprecedented level of detail using a novel combination of automated broken stick algorithm, hierarchical cluster analysis and individually fitted multivariate hidden Markov models. We found three distinct foraging strategies (pelagic, benthic, and night divers), which differed in their horizontal, vertical and temporal distribution, most likely corresponding to different prey species, and allowed us to formulate hypotheses with regard to adaptive values under different environmental scenarios. We demonstrate the advantages of our multivariate approach and inclusion of individual variation to reliably gain a deeper understanding of the adaptive value and ecological relevance of foraging strategies of marine predators in dynamic environments. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00442-021-04850-w. Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2021-01-24 2021 /pmc/articles/PMC7882564/ /pubmed/33491108 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-04850-w Text en © The Author(s) 2021 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Behavioral Ecology–Original Research
Schwarz, Jonas F. L.
Mews, Sina
DeRango, Eugene J.
Langrock, Roland
Piedrahita, Paolo
Páez-Rosas, Diego
Krüger, Oliver
Individuality counts: A new comprehensive approach to foraging strategies of a tropical marine predator
title Individuality counts: A new comprehensive approach to foraging strategies of a tropical marine predator
title_full Individuality counts: A new comprehensive approach to foraging strategies of a tropical marine predator
title_fullStr Individuality counts: A new comprehensive approach to foraging strategies of a tropical marine predator
title_full_unstemmed Individuality counts: A new comprehensive approach to foraging strategies of a tropical marine predator
title_short Individuality counts: A new comprehensive approach to foraging strategies of a tropical marine predator
title_sort individuality counts: a new comprehensive approach to foraging strategies of a tropical marine predator
topic Behavioral Ecology–Original Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7882564/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33491108
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-04850-w
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