Katie J. Harrington

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• PhD at University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna

Aim To understand the influence of Andean uplifts and glacial cycles on South American biodiversity, we delve into the population genetics and evolutionary history of a unique subantarctic island raptor specialised in exploiting marine food webs. Location Islands in Tierra del Fuego and Malvinas/Falklands. Time period Last glacial period to the p...

Long-term memory — information retention over long timescales — can allow animals to retain foraging skills and efficiently respond to seasonal and changing environments. Most long-term memory research is with captive species, focusing on spatial, individual or object recognition, with less known about wild species and the retention of motor task a...

Animal play behavior has received increasing attention for its relationship to cognition as a possible precursor to physical problem-solving abilities across taxa. In birds, captive studies reveal that exploring and combining novel objects correlates with advanced problem solving. However, we lack systematic investigations in the wild, thus limitin...

Innovation (i.e., a new solution to a familiar problem, or applying an existing behavior to a novel problem) plays a fundamental role in species’ ecology and evolution. It can be a useful measure for cross-group comparisons of behavioral and cognitive flexibility and a proxy for general intelligence. Among birds, experimental studies of innovation...

The biomechanics of specialized mechanical structures produced by organisms provides crucial fitness advantages. The energetic cost associated with producing these structural materials and the resulting energetic trade‐off with growth, however, is rarely quantified. We integrate resource allocation to structural material production with an energeti...

Biological invasions can drive ecosystem change and alter predator ecology by providing trophic subsidies that mitigate the effects of seasonally pulsed resources. Striated Caracaras (Phalcoboenus australis) are near threatened, non-migratory falconids who inhabit the southern coasts of South America and the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) and feed on...

Background Animals need adaptive strategies to cope with seasonal changes in prey availability to survive and reproduce, which can include migrating, prey-switching, or reducing metabolic needs. Human settlements can disrupt spatiotemporal patterning in resource availability, which can affect animals’ foraging success, particularly for juveniles wh...

Open-source technology has been increasingly used for developing low-cost animal-borne bio-loggers, however, a gap remains for a bio-logger that records both inertial movement and GPS positions. We address this need with the Tapered Wings Logger (TWLogger), an archival bio-logger that records high-resolution (e.g. 50-Hz) tri-axial accelerometry and...

Background The extent to which seasonal changes in food availability affect small-scale movements in free-ranging populations of birds of prey is relatively little studied. Here we describe a seasonal “micro-migration” of a farm-island population of striated caracaras (Phalcoboenus australis) in the Falkland Islands in response to seasonal changes...