Modeling the demography of species providing extended parental care: A capture-recapture approach with a case study on Polar Bears (Ursus maritimus) ...

• Main Author: Cubaynes, Sarah
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2021
• Subjects: FOS Biological sciences; ursus maritim; Svalbard; multi-event capture-mark-recapture; female parental care; Barents Sea; Stirling; Ursus maritimus
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fn2z34tsq; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.fn2z34tsq

1. In species providing extended parental care, one or both parents care for altricial young over a period including more than one breeding season. We expect large parental investment and long-term dependency within family units to cause high variability in life trajectories among individuals with complex consequences at the population level. So far, models for estimating demographic parameters in free-ranging animal populations mostly ignore extended parental care, thereby limiting our understanding of its consequences on parents and offspring life histories. 2. We designed a capture-recapture multi-event model for studying the demography of species providing extended parental care. It handles statistical multiple-year dependency among individual demographic parameters grouped within family units, variable litter size, and uncertainty on the timing at offspring independence. It allows for the evaluation of trade-offs among demographic parameters, the influence of past reproductive history on the caring ... : Polar bears were caught and individually marked as part of a long-term monitoring program on the ecology of polar bears in the Barents Sea region (Derocher 2005). All bears one year or older were immobilized by remote injection of a dart (Palmer Cap-Chur Equipment, Douglasville, GA, USA) with the drug Zoletil® (Virbac, Carros, France) (Stirling et al. 1989). The dart was fired from a small helicopter (Eurocopter 350 B2 or B3), usually from a distance of about 4 to 10 meters. Cubs of the year were immobilized by injection with a syringe. Cubs and yearlings were highly dependent on their mother; therefore, they remained in her vicinity and were captured together with their mother. The file "CR.txt" contains the capture-histories of n= 158 family units captured between 1992 to 2019 arranged in a matrix with the status of each family unit (in rows) provided each year (in columns). Code 1 is for two-year-old independent juvenile female, code 2 is three-year-old independent juvenile female, code 3 is four-year-old ...