Central place foraging in diverse oceanic habitats: first insights into the marine ecology and behavioural flexibility of tawaki

MATTERN, THOMAS; ELLENBERG, URSULA; GARCIA BORBOROGLU, P.; SEDDON, PHIL

Cape Town

Congreso; II World Seabird Congress; 2015

World Seabird Union

During the breeding season, central place foragers have to balance the need for adequate breeding habitat with the requirement to find food to sustain themselves and their offspring. So habitat selection is crucial especially in short ranging seabird species with limited flying abilities. Penguins are probably the most extreme example with several species being confined to narrow distributional ranges for which they have adapted at times highly specialized foraging strategies. This, however, may render these species vulnerable to environmental change which may cause a spatial and temporal mismatch between food availability and penguin requirements. Despite their limited distributional range, tawaki (or Fiordland penguins, Eudyptes pachyrhynchus) inhabit remarkably diverse oceanic habitats, ranging from shallow coastal and continental shelf to pelagic and even Fiord ecosystems. For a central place forager, this considerable flexibility in foraging strategies could provide a behavioural advantage when faced with environmental change. To date, Tawaki have received very little research attention mainly because of difficult access of their breeding locations as well as their often cryptic breeding antics. Here we present the results of the first two years of the 5-year Tawaki Project to study the marine ecology of the species across its entire distributional range using data logging technology to determine foraging ranges and diving behaviour, time lapse cameras to examine nest attendance patterns and foraging trip lengths, and direct at-sea observations. From data recorded so far emerges a picture of a species with considerable behavioural plasticity providing new insights into successful coping styles of central place foragers in a rapidly changing world.