About
591
Publications
129,763
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
34,952
Citations
Citations since 2017
Publications
Publications (591)
Animals have to develop novel behaviours to adapt to anthropogenic activities or environmental changes. Fishing vessels constitute a recent feature that attracts albatrosses in large numbers. While they provide a valuable food source through offal and bait, they cause mortalities through bycatch, such that selection on vessel attraction will depend...
Long-lived monogamous species gain long-term fitness benefits by equalizing effort during biparental care. For example, many seabird species coordinate care by matching foraging trip durations within pairs. Age affects coordination in some seabird species; however, the impact of other intrinsic traits, including personality, on potential intraspeci...
The way goal-oriented birds adjust their travel direction and route in response to the wind significantly affects their travel costs. This is expected to be particularly pronounced in albatrosses, which employ a wind-dependent flight style called dynamic soaring. Dynamic soaring birds in situations without a definite goal, e.g. searching for prey,...
The subantarctic white-headed petrel is unique amongst Procellariidae by its biennial breeding frequency. Its food and feeding ecology is poorly known with limited available bio-logging data and no dietary and isotopic information. Our goal was to detail its prey species and isotopic niche at Kerguelen Islands, which is the most important breeding...
Seabirds play important roles as marine ecosystem sentinels. Studying their at-sea ecology is essential for understanding how environmental variability affects their populations. However, the at-sea ecology of small-sized temperate seabirds remains poorly studied. We explored the at-sea ecology of the Critically Endangered MacGillivray’s prion Pach...
Personality predicts divorce rates in humans, yet how personality traits affect divorce in wild animals remains largely unknown. In a male-skewed population of wandering albatross ( Diomedea exulans ), we showed that personality predicts divorce; shyer males exhibited higher divorce rates than bolder males but no such relationship was found in fema...
Individuals differ in many ways. Most produce few offspring; a handful produce many. Some die early; others live to old age. It is tempting to attribute these differences in outcomes to differences in individual traits, and thus in the demographic rates experienced. However, there is more to individual variation than meets the eye of the biologist....
Body-mounted accelerometers provide a new prospect for estimating power use in flying birds, as the signal varies with the two major kinematic determinants of aerodynamic power: wingbeat frequency and amplitude. Yet wingbeat frequency is sometimes used as a proxy for power output in isolation. There is, therefore, a need to understand which kinemat...
Body-mounted accelerometers provide a new prospect for estimating power use in flying birds, as the signal varies with the two major kinematic determinants of aerodynamic power: wingbeat frequency and amplitude. Yet wingbeat frequency is sometimes used as a proxy for power output in isolation. There is therefore a need to understand which kinematic...
Understanding the ecological mechanisms underpinning distribution patterns is vital in managing populations of mobile marine species. This study is a first step towards an integrated description of the habitats and spatial distributions of marine predators in the Natural Park of the Coral Sea, one of the world’s largest marine-protected areas at ab...
Flying seabirds are adapted for windy environments 1,2 . Despite this, storms can cause widespread strandings and wrecks, demonstrating that these seabirds are not always able to avoid or compensate for extreme conditions 3,4,5,6,7 . The maximum wind speeds that birds can operate in should vary with morphology and flight style ⁸ , but this has been...
Many animals form long‐term monogamous pair‐bonds, and the disruption of a pair‐bond (through either divorce or widowhood) can have significant consequences for individual vital rates (survival, breeding, and breeding success probabilities) and life‐history outcomes (lifetime reproductive success, life expectancy). Here, we investigated the causes...
Albatrosses are amongst the most globally-threatened species and fisheries bycatch is one of the major conservation issues worldwide. Among the albatrosses the Amsterdam albatross is listed as one of the most endangered species. Within the current National Plan of Actions framework, the present study outlines the first results of a multi-year surve...
The largest extinct volant birds (Pelagornis sandersi and Argentavis magnificens) and pterosaurs (Pteranodon and Quetzalcoatlus) are thought to have used wind-dependent soaring flight, similar to modern large birds. There are two types of soaring: thermal soaring, used by condors and frigatebirds, which involves the use of updrafts to ascend and th...
Interspecific introgression can occur between species that evolve rapidly within an adaptive radiation. Pachyptila petrels differ in bill size and are characterised by incomplete reproductive isolation, leading to interspecific gene flow. Salvin’s prion ( Pachyptila salvini ), whose bill width is intermediate between broad-billed ( P. vittata ) and...
Breeding failure is expected to induce behavioural changes in central place foragers. Indeed, after a failed reproductive attempt, breeding individuals are relieved from having to return to their breeding site for reproductive duties and thus are less constrained than successful breeders in their movements during the remainder of the breeding seaso...
Various environmental oceanic factors, such as ocean waves, affect seabird ecology; ocean waves are important, as most flying seabirds must land on ocean surfaces for foraging. However, the global ocean wave observation network is spatiotemporally poor compared to other parameters; fine-scale information on wave conditions is limited, and the influ...
Every year, billions of birds undertake extensive migrations between breeding and non-breeding areas, facing challenges that require behavioural adjustments, particularly to flight timing and duration. Such adjustments in daily activity patterns and the influence of extrinsic factors (e.g., environmental conditions, moonlight) have received much mo...
The transition to independent foraging represents an important developmental stage in the life cycle of most vertebrate animals. Juveniles differ from adults in various life history traits and tend to survive less well than adults in most long-lived animals. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain higher mortality including that of inadequ...
Managing marine systems is challenging, as many marine species are highly mobile. Albatross exemplify this paradigm, overlapping multiple threats at sea, including bycatch. The typical characterization of bycatch, the number of individuals, ignores the long-term, population-wide repercussions of bycatch. Including an estimate of the reproductive va...
Ocean circulation connects geographically distinct ecosystems across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales via exchanges of physical and biogeochemical properties. Remote oceanographic processes can be especially important for ecosystems in the Southern Ocean, where the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) transports properties across ocean ba...
The study demonstrates the versatility of integration of inertial navigation and global navigation satellite system (GNSS) with its unique application to seabird biologging. Integrated navigation was originally developed in the field of aerospace engineering, which requires accurate and reliable position, velocity, and attitude information for the...
The period of emancipation, when juvenile seabirds change from a terrestrial existence to a life at sea, is associated with many challenges. Apart from finding favourable foraging sites, they have to develop effective prey search patterns and physiological capacities that enable them to capture sufficient prey to meet their energetic needs. Animals...
The ability of individuals and populations to adapt to a changing climate is a key determinant of population dynamics. While changes in mean behaviour are well studied, changes in trait variance have been largely ignored, despite being assumed to be crucial for adapting to a changing environment. As the ability to acquire resources is essential to...
Background
The internal environment of eggs in most birds is regulated by transferring heat energy through contact incubation, maintaining nest microclimate, and frequent egg turning by the incubating parent on its nest. However, we lack information about egg attendance patterns in birds that breed in polar environments where variations in life his...
Increasing human activities have detrimental consequences on marine ecosystems and their impact can have cumulative effects. Within marine ecosystems, seabirds respond to ecosystem variability and face multiple human pressures, especially threatened species. In long-lived species, juveniles and immatures could represent up to 50% of the total popul...
Feral cats (Felis catus) are a potential threat for several seabird species including medium sized albatrosses, but studies documenting predation behavior, demographic impacts and effects of predator control are scarce. Here, we present data on feral cat predation behavior on one of the world’s largest seabirds, the wandering albatross (Diomedea ex...
Seabirds are amongst the most threatened birds in the world (Dias et al. 2019). Albatrosses and petrels are particularly vulnerable as they are long-lived, have a delayed sexual maturity, and low annual reproductive output. They have a wide at-sea distribution, occurring across all oceans and adjacent coastlines and islands. These extensive ranges...
Migratory marine species cross political borders and enter the high seas, where the lack of an effective global management framework for biodiversity leaves them vulnerable to threats. Here, we combine 10,108 tracks from 5775 individual birds at 87 sites with data on breeding population sizes to estimate the relative year-round importance of nation...
Foraging distribution of flying seabirds is constrained by environmental factors influencing individual decision-making. This must be particularly true during the breeding period, when individuals face additional limitations imposed by their central-place foraging behaviour. We used GPS data loggers and Argos PTTs to track the foraging flights of B...
Delord et al. Factors affecting adult body condition in the endangered northern rockhopper penguin. Mar Biol 168, 27 (2021) - Supplementary
The first year of life is a period of high mortality in animals. Reduced foraging capacities of naive individuals might be the primary cause of their mortality. These capacities are supposed to be progressively acquired during the first months of life. In this study, we investigate the ontogeny of flight capacities, by day and night, of first‐year...
Albatrosses attend fishing boats to feed on fishing discards but are often at risk of accidental bycatch. To examine whether populations (same species) and sexes differ in their overlap with fisheries due to differences in habitat use, we combined the use of recently developed loggers equipped with GPS and boat radar detectors with Automatic-Identi...
Many seabirds are attracted to fishing boats where they exploit foraging opportunities , often involving bycatch-related mortality. Bycatch risk is generally estimated by overlapping seabirds foraging ranges with coarse-scale monthly maps of fishing efforts, but a more direct estimation would be the time birds actually spend attending fishing boats...
The largest extinct volant birds ( Pelagornis sandersi and Argentavis magnificens ) and pterosaurs ( Pteranodon and Quetzalcoatlus ) are thought to have used wind-dependent soaring flight, similar to modern large birds. There are two types of soaring: thermal soaring, used by condors and frigatebirds, which involves the use of updrafts over the lan...
Compensating for wind drift can improve goalward flight efficiency in animal taxa, especially among those that rely on thermal soaring to travel large distances. Little is known, however, about how animals acquire this ability. The great frigatebird (Fregata minor) exemplifies the challenges of wind drift compensation because it lives a highly pela...
Two species breeding in sympatry are more likely to coexist if their ecological niches are segregated either in time, space or in trophic habits. Here, we combined GPS-tracking, stable isotope analysis and DNA metabarcoding analysis to understand how the rare Tahiti petrel Pseudobulweria rostrata (TP) copes with the very abundant (i.e. 500,000 bree...
Biparental care is widespread in avian species. Individuals may match the contribution of their partner, resulting in equal parental effort, or may exploit their partner, to minimise their own investment. These two hypotheses have received much theoretical and empirical attention in short-lived species, that change mates between seasons. However, i...
Biparental care is widespread in avian species. Individuals may match the contribution of their partner, resulting in equal parental effort, or may exploit their partner, to minimise their own investment. These two hypotheses have received much theoretical and empirical attention in short‐lived species, that change mates between seasons. However, i...
Human activities generate food attracting many animals worldwide, causing major conservation issues. The spatio-temporal predictability of anthropogenic resources could reduce search costs for animals and mediate their attractiveness. We investigated this through GPS tracking in breeding black-browed albatrosses attracted to fishing boats. We teste...
In December 2017, on Possession Island (part of the Crozet Archipelago in the southern Indian Ocean), we observed two breeding white‐chinned petrels (Procellaria aequinoctialis ) with very high levels of tick (Ixodes kerguelenensis ) infestation on both eyes. This degree of infestation was likely responsible for the birds’ death. Although this rare...
The reduced species richness typical of oceanic islands provides an interesting environmental setup to examine in natura the epidemiological dynamics of infectious agents with potential implications for public health and/or conservation. On Amsterdam Island (Indian Ocean), recurrent die-offs of Indian yellow-nosed albatross (Thalassarche carteri) n...
Individual heterogeneity in diet and foraging behaviour is common in wild animal populations, and can be a strong determinant of how populations respond to environmental changes. Within populations, variation in foraging behaviour and the occurrence of individual tactics in relation to resources distribution can help explain differences in individu...
Penguins are important top consumers in marine food webs and are one of the most threatened bird families, especially by climate change and food web alterations by marine fisheries. Yet, long-term population trends are lacking or are uncertain for many populations. Seven species of penguins breeding at the French Southern Territories in the souther...
Anthropogenic climate change is altering the geographical distribution and regular movements of species. Highly‐mobile pelagic seabirds, such as albatrosses, are particularly threatened by human activities, such as fisheries bycatch. Predicting the impact of climate change on how these animals roam the ocean is an important step towards making info...
In a highly dynamic airspace, flying animals are predicted to adjust foraging behaviour to variable wind conditions to minimize movement costs. Sexual size dimorphism is widespread in wild animal populations, and for large soaring birds which rely on favourable winds for energy‐efficient flight, differences in morphology, wing loading and associate...
Background:
The timing of events in the early part of the breeding season is crucially important for successful reproduction. Long-lived animals that migrate large distances independently of each other meet at the breeding sites to re-establish their pair bonds and coordinate their breeding duties with their partners.
Methods:
Using miniature li...
A widespread hypothesis for the ontogeny of behavior and decision-making is the early-exploration-later-canalization hypothesis. It postulates that juveniles are more exploratory and adults more consistent in their behavior. In addition, it is often assumed that naïve juveniles could overcome the costs of individual experience building by copying m...
Southern Ocean ecosystems are under pressure from resource exploitation and climate change1,2. Mitigation requires the identification and protection of Areas of Ecological Significance (AESs), which have so far not been determined at the ocean-basin scale. Here, using assemblage-level tracking of marine predators, we identify AESs for this globally...
The Retrospective Analysis of Antarctic Tracking Data (RAATD) is a Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research project led jointly by the Expert Groups on Birds and Marine Mammals and Antarctic Biodiversity Informatics, and endorsed by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. RAATD consolidated tracking data for mul...
The Retrospective Analysis of Antarctic Tracking Data (RAATD) is a Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research project led jointly by the Expert Groups on Birds and Marine Mammals and Antarctic Biodiversity Informatics, and endorsed by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. RAATD consolidated tracking data for mul...
With threats to nature becoming increasingly prominent, in order for biodiversity levels to persist, there is a critical need to improve implementation of conservation measures. In the oceans, the surveillance of fisheries is complex and inadequate, such that quantifying and locating nondeclared and illegal fisheries is persistently problematic. Gi...
Lunar phase and illumination are known to affect nocturnal behavior of many organisms, particularly through predator-prey interactions. Visual predators can benefit from higher light levels to increase their activity, while prey may decrease their activity to avoid predation. The lower number of nocturnal seabirds observed on colonies during full m...
The identification of geographic areas where the densities of animals are highest across their annual cycles is a crucial step in conservation planning. In marine environments, however, it can be particularly difficult to map the distribution of species, and the methods used are usually biased towards adults, neglecting the distribution of other li...
Life-history theory predicts that, to optimize their fitness, individuals should increase their reproductive effort as their residual reproductive value decreases. Accordingly, several studies have shown that individuals downregulate their glucocorticoid stress response (a proxy of reproductive investment in vertebrates) as they age, and as the sub...
1) The early‐life of animals is a period of high mortality, when foraging capacities are assumed to be improved progressively. In birds, this critical period involves the improvement of the flight. How do young birds gain these capacities has rarely been studied in natural conditions especially in seabirds that spend most of their life at sea. 2) W...
The wedge-tailed shearwater (WTS) population of New Caledonia is one of the largest in the world, yet its biology and foraging ecology are poorly known. We studied WTS from 4 colonies in New Caledonia. We examined foraging behaviour and habitats using GPS receivers and light sensors during and outside the breeding season, respectively, and compared...
Oceanic islands with reduced species richness provide an opportunity to investigate the emergence, maintenance and transmission of infectious diseases threatening wildlife. On Amsterdam Island, in the southern Indian Ocean, massive and recurrent mortality of the nestlings of Indian yellow-nosed albatross (Thalassarche carteri) has been attributed t...
1) The early-life of animals is a period of high mortality, when foraging capacities are assumed to be improved progressively. In birds, this critical period involves the improvement of the flight. How do young birds gain these capacities has rarely been studied in natural conditions especially in seabirds that spend most of their life at sea.
2)...
• High juvenile mortality rates are typical of many long‐lived marine vertebrate predators. Insufficient development in dive and forage ability is considered a key driver of this. However, direct links to survival outcome are sparse, particularly in free‐ranging marine animals that may not return to land.
• In this study, we conduct exploratory inv...
The file contains tracking data of albatrosses from Crozet, Kerguelen, Amsterdam and Marion Islands, including identity, location, presence of vessels and detection of radar emission. The data are used in various papers. For additional information contact henri.weimerskirch@cebc.cnrs.fr or corbeau.alexandre@gmail.com
The Paris Agreement is a multinational initiative to combat climate change by keeping a global temperature increase in this century to 2°C above preindustrial levels while pursuing efforts to limit the increase to 1.5°C. Until recently, ensembles of coupled climate simulations producing temporal dynamics of climate en route to stable global mean te...
