Integrating nutritional and movement ecology to reveal energetic linkages between seabirds and their prey

Seabirds, which are a critical component of ocean food webs, are highly responsive to changes in their foraging environment and can act as ecosystem sentinels. This proposal examines the degree to which foraging strategies are variable in response to environmental conditions in four species of seabirds in the Gulf of Maine. The team are integrating long-term and newly-collected high-resolution movement, diet, and reproductive data to advance understanding of how variation in foraging behavior, dietary breadth, and prey condition (availability and nutritional quality) interact to affect reproductive success and population resilience. The project supports research training for a postdoctoral scholar, technician, and undergraduate students, provides summer internships, develops a new undergraduate course in seabird ecology and conservation and open-source educational resources, including a textbook and coding tutorials. The results of the project, which advance understanding of species and colony-specific vulnerability to changes in foraging conditions and food resources, support management of fisheries resources and threatened and endangered seabirds. This project examines the complex ecological drivers of behavioral variation and plasticity, and the consequences for energetics and fitness across time scales and levels of biological organization (individuals, populations, and species). Using four species of seabirds as models and a combination of field and simulation modeling approaches, the research team are 1) quantifying among-individual variation in foraging strategy and foraging plasticity, 2) determining the relative roles of foraging strategy and plasticity on reproductive outcomes among individuals and among species, and 3) using bioenergetics modeling to reveal the mechanisms by which variations in diet and movement affect reproductive success across colonies and among species. The results inform the relative importance of bottom-up processes (prey availability and quality), foraging specialization, foraging plasticity to reproductive success, allowing predictions of population resilience to rapidly changing conditions in the Gulf of Maine ecosystem and generating knowledge advances that are transferable to other ecosystems and predator-prey systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.