Use of Overall Dynamic Body Acceleration for estimating energy expenditure in free-living animals; do locomotory types affect the relationships?

AGUSTINA GÓMEZ LAICH; RORY P. WILSON; ADRIAN GLEISS; EMILY L.C.SHEPARD; FLAVIO QUINTANA

Victoria, BC, Canada

Conferencia; First World Seabird Conference; 2010

Pacific Seabird Group and 25 other professional seabird and research organisations from around the world

The way in which animals use and acquire energy is fundamental to their fitness. To date, two methods have been widely used for the determination of energy expenditure in free-ranging animals: the doubly-labeled water and the heart rate methods. A recently-developed method uses overall dynamic body acceleration (ODBA) as a proxy for energy expenditure. Although this relationship has been calibrated using gas-respirometry in several species, it has only been validated for animals moving in one medium. In this work we examined whether the relationship between ODBA and energy expenditure varies between activity types and in particular, how locomotion in different media affects the regressions using the Imperial Cormorant Phalacrocorax atriceps as a model species. We determined ODBA values for this species during resting, diving, walking and flying and approximated the likely energetic costs of these behaviors using published data from congeners. Regressing mean ODBA values for resting, diving and walking periods on a single graph against mean power values of the mass-specific power (W kg-1) was related to ODBA via; Power = 12.09 + 41.31 ODBA (r2 = 0.93, P