Large-scale climatic anomalies affect marine predator foraging behaviour and demography

Charles A. Bost (), Cedric Cotté, Pascal Terray, Christophe Barbraud, Cécile Bon, Karine Delord, Olivier Gimenez, Yves Handrich, Yasuhiko Naito, Christophe Guinet and Henri Weimerskirch
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Charles A. Bost: Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé, CEBC- UMR 7372 CNRS
Cedric Cotté: Sorbonne Universités (UPMC, Univ Paris 06)-CNRS-IRD-MNHN, LOCEAN
Pascal Terray: Sorbonne Universités (UPMC, Univ Paris 06)-CNRS-IRD-MNHN, LOCEAN
Christophe Barbraud: Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé, CEBC- UMR 7372 CNRS
Cécile Bon: Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé, CEBC- UMR 7372 CNRS
Karine Delord: Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé, CEBC- UMR 7372 CNRS
Olivier Gimenez: Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive/CNRS, UMR 5175
Yves Handrich: Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien, Université de Strasbourg
Yasuhiko Naito: National Institute of Polar Research
Christophe Guinet: Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé, CEBC- UMR 7372 CNRS
Henri Weimerskirch: Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé, CEBC- UMR 7372 CNRS

Nature Communications, 2015, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Determining the links between the behavioural and population responses of wild species to environmental variations is critical for understanding the impact of climate variability on ecosystems. Using long-term data sets, we show how large-scale climatic anomalies in the Southern Hemisphere affect the foraging behaviour and population dynamics of a key marine predator, the king penguin. When large-scale subtropical dipole events occur simultaneously in both subtropical Southern Indian and Atlantic Oceans, they generate tropical anomalies that shift the foraging zone southward. Consequently the distances that penguins foraged from the colony and their feeding depths increased and the population size decreased. This represents an example of a robust and fast impact of large-scale climatic anomalies affecting a marine predator through changes in its at-sea behaviour and demography, despite lack of information on prey availability. Our results highlight a possible behavioural mechanism through which climate variability may affect population processes.

Date: 2015
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DOI: 10.1038/ncomms9220

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