Survival in macaroni penguins and the relative importance of different drivers: individual traits, predation pressure and environmental variability.

ABSTRACT: Understanding the demographic response of free-living animal populations to different drivers is the first step towards reliable prediction of population trends. Penguins have exhibited dramatic declines in population size, and many studies have linked this to bottom-up processes altering the abundance of prey species. The effects of individual traits have been considered to a lesser extent, and top-down regulation through predation has been largely overlooked due to the difficulties in empirically measuring this at sea where it usually occurs. For 10 years (2003-2012), macaroni penguins (Eudyptes chrysolophus) were marked with subcutaneous electronic transponder tags and re-encountered using an automated gateway system fitted at the entrance to the colony. We used multistate mark-recaptur

SUBMITTER: Horswill C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4284017 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature