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- Title
Foraging a new trail with northern fur seals ( Callorhinus ursinus): Lactating seals from islands with contrasting population dynamics have different foraging strategies, and forage at scales previously unrecognized by GPS interpolated dive data.
- Authors
Battaile, Brian C.; Nordstrom, Chad A.; Liebsch, Nikolai; Trites, Andrew W.
- Abstract
We reconstructed the foraging tracks of lactating northern fur seals ( Callorhinus ursinus) from two eastern Bering Sea islands (St. Paul Island and Bogoslof Island) using linear interpolation between GPS locations recorded at a maximum of four times per hour and compared it to tri-axial accelerometer and magnetometer data collected at 16 Hz to reconstruct pseudotracks between the GPS fixes. The high-resolution data revealed distances swum per foraging trip were much greater than the distances calculated using linearly interpolated GPS tracks (1.5 times further for St. Paul fur seals and 1.9 times further for Bogoslof fur seals). First passage time metrics calculated from the high resolution data revealed that the optimal scale at which the seals searched for prey was 500 m (radius of circle searched) for fur seals from St. Paul Island that went off-shelf, and 50 m for fur seals from Bogoslof Island and surprisingly, 50 m for fur seals from St. Paul that foraged on-shelf. These area-restricted search scales were significantly smaller than those calculated from GPS data alone (12 km for St. Paul and 6 km for Bogoslof) indicating that higher resolution movement data can reveal novel information about foraging behaviors that have important ecological implications.
- Subjects
FORAGING behavior; NORTHERN fur seal; MARINE animal behavior; MARINE animal geographical distribution; MAGNETOMETERS; ANIMAL behavior
- Publication
Marine Mammal Science, 2015, Vol 31, Issue 4, p1494
- ISSN
0824-0469
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/mms.12240