David Green

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Research Associate at University of Tasmania

Climate change could irreversibly modify Southern Ocean ecosystems. Marine ecosystem model (MEM) ensembles can assist policy making by projecting future changes and allowing the evaluation and assessment of alternative management approaches. However, projected changes in total consumer biomass from the Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Model Intercomp...

Climate change could irreversibly modify Southern Ocean ecosystems. Marine ecosystem model (MEM) ensembles can assist policy making by projecting future changes and allowing the evaluation and assessment of alternative management approaches. However, projected changes in total consumer biomass from the Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Model Intercomp...

Robust prediction of population responses to changing environments requires the integration of factors controlling population dynamics with processes affecting distribution. This is true everywhere but especially in polar pelagic environments. Biological cycles for many polar species are synchronised to extreme seasonality, while their distribution...

Modelling marine predator foraging habitats is a widespread research approach for projecting species responses to a rapidly changing Southern Ocean. Yet a key remaining challenge is to understand how changing prey biomass within foraging habitats could affect predator foraging success. Quantifying this using observed prey information is challenging...

Anthropogenic climate change is resulting in spatial redistributions of many species. We assessed the potential effects of climate change on an abundant and widely distributed group of diving birds, Eudyptes penguins, which are the main avian consumers in the Southern Ocean in terms of biomass consumption. Despite their abundance, several of these...

Plain Language Summary Antarctic krill (krill) are a key prey item for many Southern Ocean marine predators and also support an expanding commercial fishery. However, there is a need to identify areas of the Southern Ocean that are best for both the production of eggs, and subsequent survival until free‐swimming larvae. We create a model for spawni...

Ground-nesting birds, such as large gulls and skuas, are known to include a variety of items in their nests as pseudo-eggs, as well as to adopt the eggs of conspecifics or other species. Three hypotheses have been proposed to explain this phenomenon: incubation stimulus, mistaken food, and mistaken egg hypotheses. Of 657 Brown Skua Stercorarius ant...

Biophysical interactions are influential in determining the scale of key ecological processes within marine ecosystems. For oceanic predators, this means foraging behaviour is influenced by processes shaping the distribution of prey. However, oceanic prey is difficult to observe and its abundance and distribution is regionally generalised. We use a...

Diet studies of marine predators provide insights into the functioning and structure of marine ecosystems. Such studies have been greatly enhanced in recent years with technology enabling direct observation of feeding behaviour in the marine environment. We here report on observations of an interesting predation event involving Gentoo penguins (Pyg...

Seabirds are highly vocal on land where acoustic communication plays a crucial role in reproduction. Yet, seabirds spend most of their life at sea. They have developed a number of morphological, physiological and behavioural adaptations to forage in the marine environment. The use of acoustic signals at sea could potentially enhance seabirds' forag...

Sex-specific foraging strategies have been documented in a range of seabird species, but the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. We aimed to assess spatial and temporal differences in the foraging behaviour of Cape gannets Morus capensis at Bird Island, Algoa Bay, South Africa. In total, 79 birds attending chicks younger than 50 d were...

To help meet the high energy demands of raising the young, some seabirds alternate between short, frequent foraging trips to maximize food delivery to the young, and infrequent, long foraging trips that serve towards self-maintenance. Our study is the first to investigate the foraging behaviour of gentoo penguins at Marion Island, which we did thro...

Seabirds forage in a dynamic environment of heterogeneously distributed prey resources. Many seabird species use oceanographic features that promote prey aggregation, as a means of locating prey patches. The combination of tracking data, remote-sensing data and estimates of prey availability is useful in determining how seabirds locate prey. GPS tr...

Seabirds are upper trophic level predators, and are often highly sensitive to changes in the availability of their prey. Altered prey assemblages resulting from fluctuations in oceanographic conditions may be mirrored by shifts in seabird diet. Long-term studies of dietary change in seabirds therefore provide valuable insight into the nature of env...

During breeding, animal behaviour is particularly sensitive to environmental and food resource availability. Additionally, factors such as sex, body condition, and offspring developmental stage can influence behaviour. Amongst seabirds, behaviour is generally predictably affected by local foraging conditions and has therefore been suggested as a po...

Seabirds forage in a highly dynamic environment and prey on fish schools that are patchily distributed. Colonially breeding seabirds regularly commute back and forth from their colony to foraging areas and need to acquire information on the location of food before and/or during each foraging trip. The use of conspecifics as cues to locate prey has...

This account presents the first known observations of Cape Gannet Morus capensis fledgling mortalities as a result of aggressive nest defence behaviour by African Penguins Spheniscus demersus. Observations were conducted in 2013 on Bird Island, Algoa Bay, South Africa ? the world's largest breeding colony of Cape Gannets. Twentyeight attacks were w...

1. Seabird proxies have the potential to act as useful and cost-effective indicators of the state of the marine environment. Seabird time-activity budgets, in particular, reflect short-term changes in prey conditions. 2. We tested an automated technique for long-term continuous recording of Cape gannet, Morus capensis, time-activity budgets using...

The Cape gannet, Morus capensis, has long been considered a monomorphic species despite attempts at phenotypically separating the sexes. In a further effort we here recorded morphometric measurements from genetically sexed Cape gannets. Discriminant function analysis was used to classify sexes according to these morphometric measurements. Culmen an...

Avian breeding colonies often suffer high levels of predation along their margins. Nest predation is a major fitness concern for parents and therefore nests inside of the colony edge might be at a premium. This was tested through studying the colonial breeding seabird, the Cape Gannet Morus capensis, at Bird Island, Algoa Bay, South Africa. We foun...