Investigating two consecutive catastrophic breeding seasons in a large king penguin colony

Brisson-Curadeau, Émile; Scheffer, Annette; Trathan, Philip ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6673-9930; Roquet, Fabien; Cotté, Cédric; Delord, Karine; Barbraud, Christophe; Elliott, Kyle; Bost, Charles-André. 2023 Investigating two consecutive catastrophic breeding seasons in a large king penguin colony. Scientific Reports, 13, 12967. 10, pp. 10.1038/s41598-023-40123-7

Before downloading, please read NORA policies.

Preview

Text (Open Access)
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 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/.
s41598-023-40123-7.pdf - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.
Download (4MB) | Preview

Official URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-40123-7

Abstract/Summary

Large-scale breeding failures, such as offspring die-offs, can disproportionately impact wildlife populations that are characterized by a few large colonies. However, breeding monitoring—and thus investigations of such die-offs—is especially challenging in species with long reproductive cycles. We investigate two unresolved dramatic breeding failures that occurred in consecutive years (2009 and 2010) in a large king penguin Aptenodytes patagonicus colony, a long-lived species with a breeding cycle lasting over a year. Here we found that a single period, winter 2009, was likely responsible for the occurrence of breeding anomalies during both breeding seasons, suggesting that adults experienced poor foraging conditions at sea at that time. Following that unfavorable winter, the 2009 breeding cohort—who were entering the late stage of chick-rearing—immediately experienced high chick mortality. Meanwhile, the 2010 breeding cohort greatly delayed their arrival and egg laying, which would have otherwise started not long after the winter. The 2010 breeding season continued to display anomalies during the incubation and chick-rearing period, such as high abandonment rate, long foraging trips and eventually the death of all chicks in winter 2010. These anomalies could have resulted from either a domino-effect caused by the delayed laying, the continuation of poor foraging conditions, or both. This study provides an example of a large-scale catastrophic breeding failure and highlights the importance of the winter period on phenology and reproduction success for wildlife that breed in few large colonies.

Item Type:	Publication - Article
Digital Object Identifier (DOI):	10.1038/s41598-023-40123-7
ISSN:	2045-2322
Date made live:	15 Aug 2023 08:25 +0 (UTC)
URI:	https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/535595

Item Type:

Publication - Article

Digital Object Identifier (DOI):

10.1038/s41598-023-40123-7

ISSN:

2045-2322

Date made live:

15 Aug 2023 08:25 +0 (UTC)

URI:

https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/535595