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Seascapes of fear and competition shape regional seabird movement ecology

Fear effects of predators on prey distributions are seldom considered in marine environments, especially over large spatial scales and in conservation contexts. To fill these major gaps, we tested the Seascape of Fear Hypothesis in the Benguela marine ecosystem off South Africa. Using electronic tra...

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Autores principales: Courbin, Nicolas, Pichegru, Lorien, Seakamela, Mduduzi, Makhado, Azwianewi, Meÿer, Michael, Kotze, Pieter G. H., Mc Cue, Steven A., Péron, Clara, Grémillet, David
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8897475/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35246607
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s42003-022-03151-z
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author Courbin, Nicolas
Pichegru, Lorien
Seakamela, Mduduzi
Makhado, Azwianewi
Meÿer, Michael
Kotze, Pieter G. H.
Mc Cue, Steven A.
Péron, Clara
Grémillet, David
author_facet Courbin, Nicolas
Pichegru, Lorien
Seakamela, Mduduzi
Makhado, Azwianewi
Meÿer, Michael
Kotze, Pieter G. H.
Mc Cue, Steven A.
Péron, Clara
Grémillet, David
author_sort Courbin, Nicolas
collection PubMed
description Fear effects of predators on prey distributions are seldom considered in marine environments, especially over large spatial scales and in conservation contexts. To fill these major gaps, we tested the Seascape of Fear Hypothesis in the Benguela marine ecosystem off South Africa. Using electronic tracking data, we showed that Cape gannets and their predator, the Cape fur seal, co-occurred in daytime and competed with fisheries within coastal areas. At night, gannets are particularly vulnerable to seals, and 28% of the birds returned to the safety of their breeding colony. The remaining 72% slept at the sea surface, but shifted to offshore areas with lower seal attendance, reducing predation risk by 25%. Overall, our integrative study demonstrates how fear and competition shape the seascape of threatened Cape gannets within a marine environment perturbed by climate change and overfishing. Such knowledge has strong implications for the design of marine protected areas.
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spelling pubmed-88974752022-03-22 Seascapes of fear and competition shape regional seabird movement ecology Courbin, Nicolas Pichegru, Lorien Seakamela, Mduduzi Makhado, Azwianewi Meÿer, Michael Kotze, Pieter G. H. Mc Cue, Steven A. Péron, Clara Grémillet, David Commun Biol Article Fear effects of predators on prey distributions are seldom considered in marine environments, especially over large spatial scales and in conservation contexts. To fill these major gaps, we tested the Seascape of Fear Hypothesis in the Benguela marine ecosystem off South Africa. Using electronic tracking data, we showed that Cape gannets and their predator, the Cape fur seal, co-occurred in daytime and competed with fisheries within coastal areas. At night, gannets are particularly vulnerable to seals, and 28% of the birds returned to the safety of their breeding colony. The remaining 72% slept at the sea surface, but shifted to offshore areas with lower seal attendance, reducing predation risk by 25%. Overall, our integrative study demonstrates how fear and competition shape the seascape of threatened Cape gannets within a marine environment perturbed by climate change and overfishing. Such knowledge has strong implications for the design of marine protected areas. Nature Publishing Group UK 2022-03-04 /pmc/articles/PMC8897475/ /pubmed/35246607 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s42003-022-03151-z Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This 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 license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license 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 license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Courbin, Nicolas
Pichegru, Lorien
Seakamela, Mduduzi
Makhado, Azwianewi
Meÿer, Michael
Kotze, Pieter G. H.
Mc Cue, Steven A.
Péron, Clara
Grémillet, David
Seascapes of fear and competition shape regional seabird movement ecology
title Seascapes of fear and competition shape regional seabird movement ecology
title_full Seascapes of fear and competition shape regional seabird movement ecology
title_fullStr Seascapes of fear and competition shape regional seabird movement ecology
title_full_unstemmed Seascapes of fear and competition shape regional seabird movement ecology
title_short Seascapes of fear and competition shape regional seabird movement ecology
title_sort seascapes of fear and competition shape regional seabird movement ecology
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8897475/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35246607
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s42003-022-03151-z
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