Interannual variation in foraging decisions in chick-rearing black-legged kittiwakes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Long-lived species must balance allocation between reproduction and self-maintenance, and such a trade-off is expected to affect their foraging behavior. A bimodal foraging strategy, where individuals alternate between long trips for self-maintenance and short trips for offspring provisioning, may reflect this compromise. Using tracking data collected over three breeding seasons, we investigated the occurrence of a bimodal foraging strategy and inter-annual variation in foraging decisions among black-legged kittiwakes (Rissa tridactyla) breeding in Kongsfjorden, Svalbard. Kongsfjorden, a glacial fjord with six tidewater glacier fronts, provides close foraging opportunities to breeding sites. The continental shelf break outside the fjord offers another foraging area but involves higher commuting costs. We tested the hypothesis that breeding adults perform foraging trips outside the fjord for self-maintenance. We predicted that (1) adults were more likely to undertake foraging trips outside the fjord when their body condition was low and that (2) individuals foraging outside the fjord were likelier to improve their body condition than those foraging within. Our results indicate that kittiwakes in Kongsfjorden may adopt a bimodal foraging strategy during chick-rearing, but not every year. Contrary to our first prediction, we found no evidence that adult body condition affected the probability of foraging at distant sites. However, adults were more likely to maintain or improve body condition during outside-fjord foraging trips, supporting the hypothesis that long-distance trips can be used for self-maintenance. Overall, our results suggest that bimodal foraging is not a fixed characteristic of kittiwake foraging behavior and may be influenced by environmental conditions.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".