Individual parameters shape foraging activity in breeding king penguins

Maryline Le Vaillant, Yan Ropert-Coudert, Yvon Le Maho and Céline Le Bohec

Behavioral Ecology, 2016, vol. 27, issue 1, 352-362

Abstract: The variability in individual fitness within a population is likely to be mediated through individual foraging ability and tactics, themselves linked to age- or experience-related processes, but also to differences in individual quality. Not only age, experience, and quality but also sex-related foraging strategies should particularly play an important role in long-lived central-place foragers that have to cope with strong environmental constraints. We monitored the foraging effort (foraging trip durations and number of trips) of 262 known-age micro-tagged king penguins, Aptenodytes patagonicus, at different breeding stages during one of their breeding cycles. We investigated how their age (4–11 years old), sex, past breeding experience (the number of successful breeding attempts), and breeding quality (the expected breeding success, corresponding to the residual of the linear relationship between the age and on the number of past breeding success divided by the number of breeding attempts) affected foraging over a whole breeding season. During the incubation, younger birds (4 years old) undertook longer foraging trips compared with older ones. During the brooding phase and the second period of the crèching phase, more experienced birds performed shorter foraging trip than those with a low breeding experience, whereas, during the first period of the crèching phase, individuals with better breeding quality performed shorter foraging trips at sea than low breeding quality individuals. Sex-specific foraging patterns were also observed depending on the period of the breeding cycle. Our study shows, for the first time, how foraging effort can be driven by a complex interplay of several individual parameters according to breeding stage and resource availability and abundance.

Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arv146 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:27:y:2016:i:1:p:352-362.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().