Loyalty pays: potential life history consequences of fidelity to marine foraging regions by southern elephant seals

By Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Mark A. Hindell, Michael Sumner, Kelvin J. Michael. 2004

235 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Choices made by foraging animals should maximize energy intake, although ‘irrational’ short-term behaviours are common. One explanation for this is that environmental variation may lead to the evolution of behaviours that benefit individual reproductive output, but only over long timescales. Long-term (multiyear) fidelity to foraging regions in extremely variable environments may confer ecological benefits to individuals, such as familiarity with resources, even when energy gain is not consistently high in all years. We examined the annual foraging ranges (sometimes exceeding 3.5 million km2) of female southern elephant seals, Mirounga leonina, over 4 years and found that individuals used preferred regions year after year. We hypothesized that the degree of fidelity in a particular year was related to the foraging success (as measured by mass gain) in the previous year; however, there was no significant relation between the two. Despite this high variation in annual foraging success, the regions revisited in consecutive years provided higher potential food production as measured by higher variance in sea surface temperatures over two decades (a surrogate measure of ocean productivity). The evolution of long-term fidelity assisted by simple navigational rules may confer energetic advantages over an individual's lifetime and explain the existence of seemingly nonadaptive short-term behaviours.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/477df03feb84dea3f9afc0211772f005222d7de0

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Citations in the corpus

Southern elephant seal trajectories, fronts and eddies in the Brazil/Malvinas Confluence (2006, background): “But the most frequently studied relationship between the physical environment and behavior involves SST (e.g., Field et al., 2001; McConnell et al., 2002; Bradshaw et al., 2004b).”
Extrinsic and intrinsic determinants of winter foraging and breeding phenology in a temperate seabird (2005, background): “The loggers recorded time, immersion in seawater and light intensity ( Afanasyev 2004 ).”
Why do Argos satellite tags deployed on marine animals stop transmitting (2007, background): “…knowledge of long-distance movements of reptiles (e.g. Luschi et al., 2001, 2003; James et al., 2005b, 2006), fish (e.g. Sims et al., 2005; Weng et al., 2005), birds (e.g. Nel et al., 2001; Phillips et al., 2006) and mammals (e.g. Burns et al., 2004; Bradshaw et al., 2004; Harcourt et al., 2002).”
Circumpolar habitat use in the southern elephant seal: implications for foraging success and population trajectories (2016, background): “This interpretation only holds true if the seals do not readily switch between foraging areas, but this appears to be the case, elephant seals have a high degree of individual foraging site fidelity over periods of up to 10 yr (Bradshaw et al. 2004b, Robinson et al. 2012).”
Basking sharks and oceanographic fronts: quantifying associations in the north‐east Atlantic (2015, background): “Many marine vertebrates exhibit broad-scale foraging site fidelity over seasonal, annual or interannual timescales (e.g. seals, Bradshaw et al. 2004; sharks, Pade et al. 2009; Queiroz et al. 2012; whales, Irvine et al. 2014; seabirds, Patrick et al. 2014), indicating that spatio-temporal…”
Making habitat selection more “familiar”: a review (2011, background): “…Waser and Wiley 1980; Kokko et al. 2006), (2) capacity to learn locations of food (Zach and Falls 1979; Dyer 1996; Dumont and Hill 2001; Shanks 2002; Bradshaw et al. 2004; Gonzalez-Gomez and Vasquez 2006), (3) efficient movement (Cain et al. 1994; Stamps 1995; Kamil and Cheng 2001; Lopez et al.…”
A comparison of indirect measures of feeding behaviour based on ARGOS tracking data (2007, methodology): “Kernel analyses (Wood et al., 2000; Hyrenbach et al., 2002; Bradshaw et al., 2003; Beauplet et al., 2004) and time-in-area plots (Bradshaw et al., 2002, 2004; Van den Hoff et al., 2002) are attractive in that they can readily combine data from multiple individuals, species, or even years, but the…”
Linking foraging behaviour to physical oceanographic structures: Southern elephant seals and mesoscale eddies east of Kerguelen Islands (2010, background): “Previous studies have shown that fronts and sea-ice play a key role in the foraging activity of elephant seals in other geographic areas (Bradshaw et al., 2004; Biuw et al., 2007).”