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Habitat-mediated population limitation in a colonial central-place forager: the sky is not the limit for the black-browed albatross.
- Source :
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences; 3/7/2014, Vol. 281 Issue 1778, p1-1, 1p
- Publication Year :
- 2014
-
Abstract
- Animal populations are frequently limited by the availability of food or of habitat. In central-place foragers, the cost of accessing these resources is distance-dependent rather than uniform in space. However, in seabirds, a widely studied exemplar of this paradigm, empirical population models have hitherto ignored this cost. In part, this is because non-independence among colonies makes it difficult to define population units. Here, we model the effects of both resource availability and accessibility on populations of a wide-ranging, pelagic seabird, the black-browed albatross Thalassarche melanophris. Adopting a multi-scale approach, we define regional populations objectively as spatial clusters of colonies. We consider two readily quantifiable proxies of resource availability: the extent of neritic waters (the preferred foraging habitat) and net primary production (NPP). We show that the size of regional albatross populations has a strong dependence, after weighting for accessibility, on habitat availability and to a lesser extent, NPP. Our results provide indirect support for the hypothesis that seabird populations are regulated from the bottom-up by food availability during the breeding season, and also suggest that the spatio-temporal predictability of food may be limiting. Moreover, we demonstrate a straightforward, widely applicable method for estimating resource limitation in populations of central-place foragers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 09628452
- Volume :
- 281
- Issue :
- 1778
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 94258411
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.2883