Good days, bad days: wind as a driver of foraging success in a flightless seabird, the southern rockhopper penguin ...
Due to their restricted foraging range, flightless seabirds are ideal models to study the short-term variability in foraging success in response to environmentally driven food availability. Wind can be a driver of upwelling and food abundance in marine ecosystems such as the Southern Ocean, where wi...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Universitätsbibliothek Gießen
2013
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.22029/jlupub-126 https://jlupub.ub.uni-giessen.de//handle/jlupub/181 |
| Summary: | Due to their restricted foraging range, flightless seabirds are ideal models to study the short-term variability in foraging success in response to environmentally driven food availability. Wind can be a driver of upwelling and food abundance in marine ecosystems such as the Southern Ocean, where wind regime changes due to global warming may have important ecological consequences. Southern rockhopper penguins (Eudyptes chrysocome) have undergone a dramatic population decline in the past decades, potentially due to changing environmental conditions. We used a weighbridge system to record daily foraging mass gain (the difference in mean mass of adults leaving the colony in the morning and returning to the colony in the evening) of adult penguins during the chick rearing in two breeding seasons. We related the day-to-day variability in foraging mass gain to ocean wind conditions (wind direction and wind speed) and tested for a relationship between wind speed and sea surface temperature anomaly (SSTA). Foraging ... |
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