Data from: Study "Northern Gannet Breeding Season GPS Data from Cape St. Mary's, NL, Canada: 2019 to 2022" ...

• Main Authors: D'Entremont, Kyle J.N., Davoren, Gail K., Montevecchi, William A.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Movebank Data Repository 2023
• Subjects: Morus bassanus; animal foraging; animal movement; animal tracking; GPS logger; GPS telemetry; northern gannet; seabirds; time-depth recorder; Canada; Newfoundland; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5441/001/1.5km7v2s3; https://www.datarepository.movebank.org/handle/10255/move.1592

Seabirds are constrained by central-place foraging during breeding, when the energy obtained from prey must outweigh the costs of travel, search, capture and transport. The distribution and phenology of the cold-blooded marine fishes they exploit are heavily influenced by oceanic climate. Northern gannets, the largest breeding seabird in the North Atlantic, use a generalist foraging strategy, preying on a wide array of pelagic fishes. They employ different for- aging tactics for different prey types, with rapid, shallow V-shaped dives used for large, powerful prey such as mackerel, and U-shaped dives for smaller forage fishes like capelin. Here we assess intra- and inter-annual differences in foraging effort and influences of prey availability at the southernmost colony of the species at Cape St. Mary’s, Newfoundland, Canada. We compared for- aging trip characteristics (total and maximum distance, directness, duration and number of dives) of parental gannets during the breeding seasons of 2019 (n = 10) and ...