Flexible foraging effort shapes Adélie penguin reproductive success across Antarctica and sea ice conditions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understanding how species deal with diverse environmental conditions is crucial for predicting their future responses to climate change. In Antarctica, changing sea ice dynamics threaten ice-dependent species. While behavioural adjustments could help mitigate these threats, their effectiveness under future environmental conditions and potential thresholds remain unclear. Long-term studies and circumpolar approaches could address this challenge. Our 15-year study (2010-2024) of over 23,000 foraging trips from Adélie penguins ( Pygoscelis adeliae ) in East Antarctica, identified a non-linear relationship between sea ice concentration (SIC) and foraging effort when landfast ice was absent, a situation anticipated to define the species′ future habitat during chick-rearing. Minimal effort occurred at 10-20% SIC, but more than doubled with the presence of landfast ice or heavy pack-ice, with females showing greater sensitivity to these ice changes. A circumpolar analysis of similar data demonstrated that foraging effort during chick-guarding predicted reproductive success across ten Adélie penguin populations. Reproductive success remained high until foraging trips exceeded approximately 29 hours, after which performance declined sharply. This indicates that while behavioural flexibility can buffer against moderate environmental changes, it has clear limits. Our findings establish foraging trip duration as a valuable early warning indicator for population responses to environmental change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".