Fantastic feasts and where to find them : using biologging to investigate foraging behaviour of marine megafauna across a range of spatiotemporal scales ...
Understanding the strategies animals use to locate, select, and capture prey can guide more robust conservation efforts. In marine megafauna, foraging is often inferred from infrequent surface positions using biotelemetry tags. In this thesis I argue that finer-scale measurements of predator movemen...
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| Language: | English |
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University of St Andrews
2021
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| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.17630/sta/125 https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/23835 |
| Summary: | Understanding the strategies animals use to locate, select, and capture prey can guide more robust conservation efforts. In marine megafauna, foraging is often inferred from infrequent surface positions using biotelemetry tags. In this thesis I argue that finer-scale measurements of predator movements, prey availability and behaviour are critical to understanding foraging decisions. To explore this I used multi-sensor, high-resolution biologging tags on three megafauna species and compared optimal foraging predictions to actual behaviour over a hierarchy of spatiotemporal scales. At the landscape scale, I studied a central-place forager, the harbour seal, which accesses distant and nearshore prey although the relative importance of these resources is poorly understood. I found that prey encounter rates were similar for the two resources but while prey were distributed extensively offshore, inshore foraging was concentrated in just a few discrete patches. I suggest that the trade-off between accessibility and ... |
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