Winter migration and carry-over effects in planktivorous and piscivorous seabirds breeding on St. Lawrence Island

• Main Author: Kitaysky, Alexander
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Axiom Data Science 2021
• Subjects: Bering Sea; Lawrence Island; Savoonga; Sea ice; St Lawrence Island; Alaska
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.24431/rw1k5bk; https://search.dataone.org/#view/10.24431/rw1k5bk

These data were collected at seabird colonies near Savoonga, Alaska, on St. Lawrence Island in mid-July-August of 2016-2019 and late June 2019 to address the question: will the northern Bering Sea seabird community benefit from winter sea ice loss? Our focal species included black-legged kittiwakes, thick-billed and common murres, and least and crested auklets. Birds were captured at their nest sites using a telescoping noose pole (murres and kittiwakes) or by hand (auklets). Both auklet species were also captured using mist-nets. We collected blood and feather samples to infer diet, physiological costs, and molecular damage associated with environmental conditions during the breeding and non-breeding period. In addition we deployed bird-borne geolocators on a subset of individuals to track their winter migration. Finally, during the breeding season we collected chick meals from adult auklets to characterize changes in the zooplankton community. Here we have archived the stable isotope values, corticosterone concentrations (indicative of nutritional stress), and telomere lengths for individual seabirds. Also included are individual files with the daily positions of migrating seabirds obtained from geolocator tags. Finally, we include two data sets containing the species composition of auklet chick diets. This project contains three datasets. The first are individually collected migration tracks from seabirds breeding on St. Lawrence Island, collected to understand how sea ice affects seabird migratory decisions (50 files). The second set of files contains physiological data collected from seabirds breeding on St. Lawrence Island, used to measure their responses to changes in sea ice during the breeding and non-breeding life stages (2 files). The third set of files contains prey composition of auklet chick diets collected during the chick-rearing period in the summers of 2016-2019 at Kitnik colony on St. Lawrence Island (2 files). This dataset was generated as part of NPRB Core Project 1612.