Data from: Eggs brought in from afar: Svalbard-breeding pink-footed geese can fly their eggs across the Barents Sea ...

• Main Authors: Klaassen, Marcel, Hahn, Steffen, Korthals, Harry, Madsen, Jesper
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2016
• Subjects: income breeding; Capital Breeding; Holocene; Anser brachyrhynchus; Arctic; Barents Sea; Norway; Svalbard; Vesterålen
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.5p251; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.5p251

Many Arctic-breeding waterbirds are thought to bring nutrients for egg production from southern latitudes to allow early breeding. It has proved problematic to quantify the extent of such capital breeding and identify whether nutrients for egg production are brought in from nearby or from afar. Before reaching their breeding grounds on Svalbard, pink-footed geese Anser brachyrhynchus fly ∼ 1100 km across the Barents Sea from Norway. Using abdominal profile indexing (API) we scored body stores in individually marked geese just prior to migration from the northernmost staging area in Norway to Svalbard, followed by their breeding success on their non-breeding grounds in autumn. In productive breeding years leading to a high (> 13.8%) proportion of juveniles in the autumn population, there was a positive relationship between female API and number of young produced, suggesting that the geese are at least partial capital breeders. Moreover, focusing on the geographic origin of proteins used in egg synthesis ... : Figure 1 dataData underlying figure 1 including for each individual female (femaleID), the year in which it was observed, its API score upon departure from Vesterålen (APIdepart), the number of young it was observed with during the following autumn (#young) and the average percentage of juveniles in the population in that specific year of observation (PercJuvInPop).Figure 1.csvFigure 2 dataData underlying figure 2, including the average, standard deviation and sample size of the Nitrogen isotope ratios (dN_mean, dN_SD and dN_n, respectively) of three different tissues (item). The data file also contains the year in which the samples were collected as well as the site (where_whom).Figure 2.csvFigure 3 dataData underlying the two panels in Figure 3. The nitrogen isotope ratio (dN) of both yolk and albumen (item) in eggs is provided. For each egg the year of collection, the nest from which it was collected (nest) and its identity within the nest (egg; coded A-E, the coding not necessarily reflecting laying ...