The effect of seasonality on the foraging behaviour and breeding success of a tropical marine top predator
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Foraging and breeding success of tropical seabird vary seasonally. • They foraged further during twilight to consume more squid in the dry season. • Higher nest occupancy, chick condition, and breeding success in the dry season. • Potential drivers: seasonal squid availability, nest-site suitability, foraging costs. In polar and temperate regions seasonality in environmental conditions is an important driver of animal phenology. In tropical systems, where the environment is relatively homogeneous year-round, the link between phenology and seasonality is weakened, and many species breed asynchronously or even year-round. This leads to the question of how these species adapt to seasonal changes, which remain present albeit to a lesser extent. To assess relationships between foraging plasticity and seasonal changes in oceanographic conditions and resource availability, we investigated the foraging ecology of the red-billed tropicbird ( Phaethon aethereus ), a poorly studied pantropical species that breeds year-round in Cabo Verde. From 2017 to 2022, we monitored tropicbird nests at three islands (Boavista, Sal and the Cima Islet) and GPS tracked 907 foraging trips from 329 adults to evaluate seasonality in nest occupancy, foraging patterns and efficiency, chick growth, chick and adult body condition, and breeding success, alongside links to seasonal changes in resource availability and environmental conditions. We found seasonal patterns in foraging behaviour, with individuals taking more distant and less sinuous foraging trips, using a larger core foraging area, spending more time foraging during twilight, and consuming more squid in the dry season (December-June), than in the wet season (July-November). Moreover, nest occupancy, chick body condition and breeding success were higher in the dry season. We suggest that the observed seasonal patterns are related to an increase in the availability of squid at the end of the dry season, and a decrease in the nest-site suitability and an increase in weather-related foraging costs in the wet season. Our results provide some of the first in-depth knowledge on the seasonal variation in foraging behaviour of a tropical seabird species, suggesting seasonality in tropical systems may be a stronger driver of the movements of top predators than previously thought.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it