Scott A. Hatch

Institute for Seabird Research and Conservation

Climate change is altering species' traits across the globe. To predict future trait changes and understand the consequences of those changes, we need to know the environmental drivers of phenotypic change. In the present study, we use multi‐decadal long datasets to determine periods of within‐year environmental variation that predict growth of thr...

Because of ongoing rapid climate change, many ecosystems are becoming both warmer and more variable, and these changes are likely to alter the magnitude and variability of natural selection acting on wild populations. Critically, changes and fluctuations in selection can impact both population demography and evolutionary change. Therefore, predicti...

Determinants of individual variation in reallocation of limited resources towards self-maintenance versus reproduction are not well known. We tested the hypothesis that individual heterogeneity in long-term ‘somatic state’ (i) explains variation in endocrine and behavioural responses to environmental challenges, and (ii) is associated with variatio...

Since the last Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) effort to review biological effects of mercury (Hg) on Arctic biota in 2011 and 2018, there has been a considerable number of new Arctic bird studies. This review article provides contemporary Hg exposure and potential health risk for 36 Arctic seabird and shorebird species, represent...

Breeding is costly for many animals, including birds that must deliver food to a central place (i.e. nest). Measuring energy expenditure throughout the breeding season can provide valuable insights on physiological limitations by highlighting periods of high demands, and ultimately allows to improve conservation strategies. However, quantifying ene...

Theory predicts that parental heritable characteristics should shape sex allocation decisions when their effects on reproduction or survival are offspring sex-dependent. Numerous studies have questioned to what extent characteristics displayed by one of the parents matched theoretical expectations. This contrasts with the handful of studies that in...

Some of the longest and most comprehensive marine ecosystem monitoring programs were established in the Gulf of Alaska following the environmental disaster of the Exxon Valdez oil spill over 30 years ago. These monitoring programs have been successful in assessing recovery from oil spill impacts, and their continuation decades later has now provide...

A good overlap between offspring energetic requirements and availability of resources is required for successful reproduction. Accordingly, individuals from numerous species fine-tune their timing of breeding by integrating cues that predict environmental conditions during the offspring period. Besides acquiring information from their direct intera...

Seabirds are widely used as indicators of marine pollution, including mercury (Hg), because they track contaminant levels across space and time. However, many seabirds are migratory, and it is difficult to understand the timing and location of their Hg accumulation. Seabirds may obtain Hg thousands of kilometers away, during their non-breeding peri...

During the Pacific marine heatwave of 2014-2016, abundance and quality of several key forage fish species in the Gulf of Alaska were simultaneously reduced throughout the system. Capelin (Mallotus catervarius), sand lance (Ammodytes personatus), and herring (Clupea pallasii) populations were at historically low levels, and within this community abr...

https://arctox.cnrs.fr/en/home/ Mercury (Hg) is a natural trace element found in high concentrations in top predators, including Arctic seabirds. Most current knowledge about Hg concentrations in Arctic seabirds relates to exposure during the summer breeding period when researchers can easily access seabirds at colonies. However, the few studies f...

Current food supply is a major driver of timing of breeding in income-breeding animals, likely because increased net energy balance directly increases reproductive hormones and advances breeding. In capital breeders, increased net energy balance increases energy reserves, which eventually leads to improved reproductive readiness and earlier breedin...

We tested the hypothesis that segregation in wintering areas is associated with population differentiation in a sentinel North Pacific seabird, the rhinoceros auklet (Cerorhinca monocerata). We collected tissue samples for genetic analyses on five breeding colonies in the western Pacific Ocean (Japan) and on 13 colonies in the eastern Pacific Ocean...

Muscle ultrastructure is closely linked with athletic performance in humans and lab animals, and presumably plays an important role in the movement ecology of wild animals. Movement is critical for wild animals to forage, escape predators and reproduce. However, little evidence directly links muscle condition to locomotion in the wild. We used GPS-...

Genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) play a pivotal role in parasite resistance, and their allelic diversity has been associated with fitness variations in several taxa. However, studies report inconsistencies in the direction of this association, with either positive, quadratic or no association being described. These discrepancies...

Marine heatwaves are increasing in frequency and can disrupt marine ecosystems non-linearly. In this study, we examined the effect of the North Pacific warming event of 2014, the largest long-term sea surface anomaly on record, on black-legged kittiwake (Rissa tridactyla) foraging trips before, during, and after the event. We assessed foraging trip...

Biologging has revealed many of the mysteries surrounding seabird behavior far from land. However, tagging seabirds with biologgers may influence the very traits they are designed to observe. Such ‘tag effects’ are often argued to be minimal below a threshold of 3% of body mass. Nonetheless, few studies carefully separate handling from tagging effe...

Movement is a necessary yet energetically expensive process for motile animals. Yet how individuals modify their behaviour to take advantage of environmental conditions and hence optimise energetic costs during movement remains poorly understood. This is especially true for animals that move through environments where they cannot easily be observed...

Individual condition at one stage of the annual cycle is expected to influence behaviour during subsequent stages, yet experimental evidence of food-mediated carry-over effects is scarce. We used a food supplementation experiment to test the effects of food supply during the breeding season on migration phenology and non-breeding behaviour. We prov...

Carotenoid-based ornaments are common signaling features in animals. Although the mechanisms that link color-based signals to individual condition is key to understanding the evolution and function of these ornaments, they are most often poorly known. Several hypotheses have been posited. They include (i) the role of foraging abilities on carotenoi...

Climatic drivers of the size and body condition of forage fish in the North Pacific are poorly known. We hypothesized that length and condition of forage fish in the Gulf of Alaska (GoA) vary in relation to ocean temperature on multiple scales. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed morphometric data for capelin (Mallotus catervarius) and Pacific san...

Inbreeding, i.e. the mating of genetically related individuals, can lead to reduced fitness and is considered to be a major selective force of mate choice. Although inbreeding avoidance has been found in numerous taxa, individuals may face constraints when pairing, leading to mating with suboptimal partners. In such circumstances, individuals that...

Inbreeding, i.e. the mating of genetically related individuals, can lead to reduced fitness and is considered to be a major selective force of mate choice. Although inbreeding avoidance has been found in numerous taxa, individuals may face constraints when pairing, leading to mating with suboptimal partners. In such circumstances, individuals that...

As many long-lived seabirds are biparental and monogamous, individuals need to choose their mates wisely. While assortative mating based on physical traits is widely studied, mate choice in sexually monomorphic species based on behavioural traits remains poorly understood. We propose that personality is a possible factor on which mate choice is bas...

Sex allocation studies among birds and mammals are notoriously inconsistent with theoretical predictions. One explanation is the difficulty of collecting data on costs and benefits of sex-ratio adjustments, which prevents the investigation of underlying assumptions. Some predictions may thus have been tested in species where they should not have be...

Background In the North Pacific, northern fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis) forms extensive colonies in few locales, which may lead to limited gene flow and locale-specific population threats. In the Atlantic, there are thousands of colonies of varying sizes and in Europe the species is considered threatened. Prior screens and classical microsatellite de...

Many long-lived animals do not appear to show classic signs of aging, perhaps because they show negligible senescence until dying from ‘catastrophic’ mortality. Muscle senescence is seldom examined in wild animals, yet decline in muscle function is one of the first signs of aging in many lab animals and humans. Seabirds are an excellent study syste...

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in animals may have profound eco-evolutionary consequences, yet experimental studies of the sexual transmission of pathogens in wild populations are lacking. Here to identify sexually transmitted bacteria, we experimentally manipulated ejaculate transfer in black-legged kittiwakes (Rissa tridactyla) by blockin...

The behavior of many wild animals remains a mystery, as it is difficult to quantify behavior of species that cannot be easily followed throughout their daily or seasonal movements. Accelerometers can solve some of these mysteries, as they collect activity data at a high temporal resolution (<1 s), can be relatively small (<1 g) so they minimally di...

Forage fish are ecologically important to the marine environment, creating a wasp- waist trophic structure whereby many piscivorous diets are composed of a low diversity of mid- trophic species. Despite the importance of these species, knowledge of their abundance, distribu- tion, and interactions with predators is often limited. On Middleton Islan...

The tufted puffin (Fratercula cirrhata) is a generalist seabird that breeds throughout the North Pacific and eats more than 75 different prey species. Using puffins as samplers, we characterized the geographic variability in pelagic food webs across the subarctic North Pacific from the composition of ~10,000 tufted puffin meals (~56,000 prey items)...

Update on the status of Alaskamarineecosystems

Individuals must trade-off between energetically costly activities to maximize their fitness. However, the underlying physiological mechanism remains elusive. Oxidative stress, the imbalance between reactive oxygen species production and antioxidant and/or repair activities, has been suggested to underlie life-history trade-offs: greater investment...

Early-life conditions can drive ageing patterns and life history strategies throughout the lifespan. Certain social, genetic, and nutritional developmental conditions are more likely to produce high-quality offspring: those with good likelihood of recruitment and productivity. Here we call such conditions "favored states" and explore their relation...

Long-term studies of predator food habits (i.e., 'predator-based sampling') are useful for identifying patterns of spatial and temporal variability of forage nekton in marine ecosystems. We investigated temporal changes in forage fish availability and relationships to ocean climate by analyzing diet composition of three puffin species (horned puffi...

The integral of the dynamic component of acceleration over time has been proposed as a measure of energy expenditure in wild animals. We tested that idea by attaching accelerometers to free-ranging pelagic cormorants (Phalacrocorax pelagicus) and simultaneously estimating energy expenditure using doubly-labelled water. Two different formulations of...

Maternal effects occur when the mother’s phenotype influences her offspring’s phenotype. In birds, differential allocation in egg yolk components can allow mothers to compensate for the competitive disadvantage of junior chicks. We hypothesise that the parent-older chick conflict peaks at intermediate conditions: parents benefit from the younger ch...

Table S1. Summary of the linear mixed models and linear models describing variation in growth rate and mass gain in the first 10 days in senior chicks (N = 39) and junior chicks (N = 39, outlier included), respectively. Table S2. Summary of the linear models describing variation in maximum weight in senior chicks (N = 33) and junior chicks (N = 33...

Miniaturized data loggers have revolutionized the study of animal movement. However, data obtained from tagging could be compromised by impacts on animal welfare and behavior. We evaluated short-term (activity budgets, foraging trip metrics, overall dynamic body acceleration [ODBA] of flying, wingbeat frequency, adult mass, and nestling mass) and l...

Changes in climate and anthropogenic pressures might affect the composition and abundance of forage fish in the world's oceans. The junk-food hypothesis posits that dietary shifts that affect the quality (e.g., energy content) of food available to marine predators may impact their physiological state and consequently affect their fitness. Previousl...

Appendix S1 Methods and results of high‐performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry analysis of rhinoceros auklet adult and fledgling feathers for corticosterone.

Supplementation of food to wild animals is extensively applied as a conservation tool to increase local production of young. However, in long-lived migratory animals, the carry-over effects of food supplementation early in life on the subsequent recruitment of individuals into natal populations and their lifetime reproductive success are largely un...

Carotenoid-based integument coloration is extremely widespread in animals and commonly used as an honest signal of condition in sexual selection. Besides being used for color expression, carotenoids have antioxidant and immunomodulatory activity. Being a limited resource, carotenoid allocation to competing demands generates a trade-off. Recent stud...

Sex allocation theory predicts that parents should bias offspring sex according to the costs and benefits associated with producing either sex in a given context. Accurately interpreting sex-ratio biases, therefore, requires a precise identification of these selective pressures. However, such information is generally lacking. This may partly explai...

The reproductive success of wild animals usually increases with age before declining at the end of life, but the proximate mechanisms underlying those patterns remain elusive. Young animals are expected to invest less in current reproduction due to high prospects for future reproduction (the “restraint” hypothesis). The oldest animals may also show...

Animals are known to select mates to maximize the genetic diversity of their offspring in order to achieve immunity against a broader range of pathogens. Although several bird species preferentially mate with partners that are dissimilar at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), it remains unknown whether they can use olfactory cues to assess...

Background Windscapes affect energy costs for flying animals, but animals can adjust their behavior to accommodate wind-induced energy costs. Theory predicts that flying animals should decrease air speed to compensate for increased tailwind speed and increase air speed to compensate for increased crosswind speed. In addition, animals are expected t...

1.Reproduction is energetically expensive, and daily energy expenditure (DEE) often peaks during the period of rearing young. The “potentiation” hypothesis predicts that high DEE needs to be sustained by a corresponding up-regulation of metabolic machinery, thus a concomitant increase of the resting metabolic rate (RMR) is expected. Alternatively,...

In nest-bound avian offspring food shortages typically trigger a release of the stress hormone corticosterone (CORT). Recent studies indicate that CORT is passively deposited in the tissue of growing feathers and thus may provide an integrated measure of stress incurred during development in the nest. The current hypothesis predicts that, assuming...

In unpredictable environments, any tactic that enables avian parents to adjust brood size and, thus, energy expenditure to environmental conditions should be favoured. Hatching asynchrony (HA), which occurs whenever incubation commences before clutch completion, may comprise such a tactic. For instance, the sibling rivalry hypothesis states that th...

Data from eight microsatellite markers screened in 246 rhinoceros auklets (Cerorhinca monocerata) from across the North Pacific revealed multiple genetic groups. The east (North America) to west (Japan) split was clearly evident in all analyses. Within the eastern Pacific, a minimum of three genetic groups are present. Surprisingly, rhinoceros aukl...

Includes several worksheets: (1) "Background" are the background deuterium and oxygen-18 measuremetns from thick-billed mures in 2006. (2) "DEE calculations" provides the raw ppm data and calculations made to estimate daily enegy expenditure in thick-billed murres. Each band number (ID) can be cross-referenced with the time-activity file. (3) "Acti...

Life-history strategies describe that 'slow'- in contrast to 'fast'-living species allocate resources cautiously towards reproduction to enhance survival. Recent evidence suggests that variation in strategies exists not only among species but also among populations of the same species. Here, we examined the effect of experimentally induced stress o...

Fluctuating asymmetry has been suggested to be a phenotypic marker of developmental stability and is often seen as an indicator of overall quality. However, its role in sexual selection has been debated. To determine the potential role of black wingtip asymmetry in sexual selection in Black-legged Kittiwakes (Rissa tridactyla), we investigated whet...

Thyroid hormones affect in vitro metabolic intensity, increase basal metabolic rate (BMR) in the lab, and are sometimes correlated with basal and/or resting metabolic rate (RMR) in a field environment. Given the difficulty of measuring metabolic rate in the field-and the likelihood that capture and long-term restraint necessary to measure metabolic...

Flight is a key adaptive trait. Despite its advantages, flight has been lost in several groups of birds, notably among seabirds, where flightlessness has evolved independently in at least five lineages. One hypothesis for the loss of flight among seabirds is that animals moving between different media face tradeoffs between maximizing function in o...

In birds with facultative brood reduction, survival of the junior chick is thought to be regulated primarily by food availability. In black-legged kittiwakes (Rissa tridactyla) where parents and chicks are provided with unlimited access to supplemental food during the breeding season, brood reduction still occurs and varies interannually. Survival...

Life-history theory predicts that suboptimal developmental conditions may lead to faster life histories (younger age at recruitment and higher reproductive investment), but experimental testing of this prediction is still scarce in long-lived species. We report the effects of an experimental manipulation of food availability during early developmen...

Background Gastrointestinal bacteria play a central role in the health of animals. The bacteria that individuals acquire as they age may therefore have profound consequences for their future fitness. However, changes in microbial community structure with host age remain poorly understood. We characterised the cloacal bacteria assemblages of chicks...

I examined similar to 2700 food samples collected from adult and nestling black-legged kittiwakes Rissa tridactyla from 1978 through 2011 on Middleton Island in the Gulf of Alaska. The kittiwake diet was composed chiefly of fish, but invertebrates were taken in appreciable quantities in April and May. Upon spring arrival at the colony, adult kittiw...

1. The ability to store energy endogenously is an important ecological mechanism that allows animals to buffer predictable and unpredictable variation in allostatic load. The secretion of glucocorticoids, which reflects changes in allostatic load, is suggested to play a major role in the adjustment of endogenous stores to these varying conditions....