Recent prey capture experience and dynamic habitat quality mediate short-term foraging site fidelity in a seabird

Abstract

Foraging site fidelity allows animals to increase their efficiency by returning to profitable feeding areas. However, the mechanisms underpinning why animals 'stay' or 'switch' sites have rarely been investigated. Here, we explore how habitat quality and prior prey capture experience influence short-term site fidelity by the little penguin (). Using 88 consecutive foraging trips by 20 brooding penguins, we found that site fidelity was higher after foraging trips where environmental conditions were favourable, and after trips where prey capture success was high. When penguins exhibited lower site fidelity, the number of prey captures relative to the previous trip increased, suggesting that switches in foraging location were an adaptive strategy in response to low prey capture rates. Penguins foraged closer to where other penguins foraged on the same day than they did to the location of their own previous foraging site, and caught more prey when they foraged close together. This suggests that penguins aggregated flexibly when prey was abundant and accessible. Our results illustrate how foraging predators can integrate information about prior experience with contemporary information such as social cues. This gives insight into how animals combine information adaptively to exploit changing prey distribution in a dynamic environment.

Personality predicts foraging site fidelity and trip repeatability in a marine predator

“…The marine environment is characterized by both persistent oceanographic features (bathymetric structures and fronts) which generate predictable prey patches, as well as highly dynamic tidal and weather processes which result in spatiotemporally variable resource distributions (Cox et al, 2016;Scales et al, 2014). High and low reliance on environmental cues may represent alternative foraging tactics that can both be profitable within the same macro-scale habitat (Carroll, Harcourt, Pitcher, Slip, & Jonsen, 2018). Our findings suggest that shy and bold kittiwakes may differ in their propensity to adopt these two tactics during incubation, with bold individuals showing lower sensitivity to environmental cues than shy individuals, but that during the chickrearing period, shy individuals switch to a high site fidelity foraging strategy.…”

Year-round at-sea distribution and trophic resources partitioning between two sympatric Sulids in the tropical Atlantic

“…Several studies of boobies [ 33 ] and other seabird species exhibiting high foraging site fidelity [ 98 , 99 ] were carried out in highly productive marine environments (temperate regions), where prey distribution is more predictable, while in tropical areas, it has been pointed out that the presence of bathymetric features may be an important variable in increasing site fidelity [ 34 ]. Social cues, by gathering information from previous foraging trips [ 100 ], information transfer at sea [ 18 , 25 , 101 ] and at the colony [ 26 ], have also been suggested to increase site fidelity, however all were from studies in temperate areas. As females simply kept using the same areas, increasing repeatability of foraging parameters compared to the first period, and no important bathymetric features seem to be present or influencing utilized areas, this further suggests that parental involvement during this period, should be a factor explaining sexual segregation [ 13 , 15 , 16 ].…”

At sea vocal repertoire of a foraging seabird

“…Together with artificial modification of the acoustic signals (Aubin et al , Charrier et al ), this would provide insights into the acoustic communication of those species. Moreover, the marine environment will have to be considered with its own specificities (Larsen and Radford ), being wide and open and containing typical sounds from the wind and the waves. The adaptation of acoustic communication in such an environment will also have to be addressed to fully understand the use of this type of communication among other communication channels.…”

“…They need to acquire information on the location of food during each and every foraging trip. Oceanographic fronts (Schneider 1982, Bost et al 2009, Scales et al 2014 and prior experience (Davoren et al 2003, Carroll et al 2018 can be used to narrow down the search to productive areas. At a finer scale, seabirds cue on conspecifics and other marine predators to locate the presence of prey (Silverman et al 2004.…”