Northern Gannet foraging trip length increases with colony size and decreases with latitude

Clark, Bethany L.; Vigfúsdóttir, Freydís; Wanless, Sarah ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2788-4606; Hamer, Keith C.; Bodey, Thomas W.; Bearhop, Stuart; Bennison, Ashley ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9713-8310; Blackburn, Jez; Cox, Sam L.; d’Entremont, Kyle J. N.; Garthe, Stefan; Grémillet, David; Jessopp, Mark; Lane, Jude; Lescroël, Amélie; Montevecchi, William A.; Pascall, David J.; Provost, Pascal; Wakefield, Ewan D.; Warwick‐Evans, Victoria; Wischnewski, Saskia; Wright, Lucy J.; Votier, Stephen C.. 2024 Northern Gannet foraging trip length increases with colony size and decreases with latitude. Royal Society Open Science, 11, 240708. 14, pp. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.240708

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Text (Open Access) © 2024 The Author(s). Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. clark-et-al-2024-northern-gannet-foraging-trip-length-increases-with-colony-size-and-decreases-with-latitude.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract/Summary

Density-dependent competition for food influences the foraging behaviour and demography of colonial animals, but how this influence varies across a species’ latitudinal range is poorly understood. Here we used satellite tracking from 21 Northern Gannet Morus bassanus colonies (39% of colonies worldwide, supporting 73% of the global population) during chick-rearing to test how foraging trip characteristics (distance and duration) covary with colony size (138–60 953 breeding pairs) and latitude across 89% of their latitudinal range (46.81–71.23° N). Tracking data for 1118 individuals showed that foraging trip duration and maximum distance both increased with square-root colony size. Foraging effort also varied between years for the same colony, consistent with a link to environmental variability. Trip duration and maximum distance also decreased with latitude, after controlling for colony size. Our results are consistent with density-dependent reduction in prey availability influencing colony size and reveal reduced competition at the poleward range margin. This provides a mechanism for rapid population growth at northern colonies and, therefore, a poleward shift in response to environmental change. Further work is required to understand when and how colonial animals deplete nearby prey, along with the positive and negative effects of social foraging behaviour.

Item Type:	Publication - Article
Digital Object Identifier (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.240708
ISSN:	2054-5703
Additional Keywords:	central place foraging, coloniality, species distributions, bio-logging, predator–prey, seabird
Date made live:	06 Sep 2024 16:14 +0 (UTC)
URI:	https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/537978

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