Inter-colony foraging dynamics and breeding success relate to prey availability in a pursuit-diving seabird
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spatial patterns of breeding seabirds are influenced by the distribution of resources in relation to the colony and the density of conspecifics from the same or adjacent colonies. We conducted an inter-colony comparison of foraging space use and behavior, diet, and reproductive success of common murres Uria aalge breeding at a large offshore and a small inshore colony on the northeastern coast of Newfoundland (Canada) during 2016-2018 under varying prey (capelin Mallotus villosus ) biomass. Murres from the large offshore colony foraged over a greater area, with greater individual foraging distances, indicative of higher commuting costs compared to the smaller inshore colony. Although this pattern might reflect prey depletion near the offshore colony due to higher conspecific densities, it likely also reflects the greater distance to predictable, high-abundance prey aggregations. This is supported by high spatial overlap of foraging areas from both colonies near coastal, annually persistent capelin spawning sites. Adult diet was similar between colonies during incubation, but diverged during chick-rearing, with offshore murres consuming a higher proportion of alternative prey, while inshore murres consumed more capelin. These differences did not affect fledging success, although hatching success was lower in the larger colony, suggesting that divergent factors (e.g. predation, nest attendance) influence colony-specific population dynamics. Overall, our findings suggest that abundant local prey is key in shaping spatial patterns of breeding common murres in northeastern Newfoundland and results in apparently minimal intraspecific competition. As anthropogenic pressures on resource availability heighten, insight into factors influencing intraspecific foraging niche dynamics will be critical to inform management.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".