Can attraction to and competition for high-quality habitats shape breeding propensity?

In many animal species, sexually mature individuals may skip breeding opportunities despite a likely negative impact on fitness. In spatio-temporally heterogeneous environments, habitat selection theory predicts that individuals select habitats where fitness prospects are maximized. Individuals are attracted to high-quality habitat patches where they compete for high-quality breeding sites.

Breeding habitat selection across spatial scales: is grass always greener on the other side?

Habitat selection theory predicts that natural selection should favor mechanisms allowing individuals to choose habitats associated with the highest fitness prospects. However, identifying sources of information on habitat quality that individuals use to choose their breeding habitat has proved to be difficult. It has also proven difficult to identify dispersal costs that prevent individuals from joining the highest-quality sites.

Now you see him, now you don't: experience, not age, is related to reproduction in kittiwakes.

In long-lived species, individuals can skip reproduction. The proportion of breeders affects population growth rate and viability, there is a need to investigate the factors influencing intermittent breeding. The theory predicts that if lack of experience is an important constraint, breeding probabilities should increase with experience for individuals of the same age, whereas under the so-called restraint hypothesis, breeding probabilities should increase with age regardless of experience.

Drivers of age-specific survival in a long-lived seabird: contributions of observed and hidden sources of heterogeneity.

1. We assessed the relative influence of variability in recruitment age, dynamic reproductive investment (time-specific reproductive states) and frailty (unobserved differences in survival abilities across individuals) on survival in the black-legged kittiwake. Furthermore, we examined whether observed variability in survival trajectories was best explained by immediate reproductive investment, cumulative investment, or both.

Consequences of recruitment decisions and heterogeneity on age-specific breeding success in a long-lived seabird.

An individual's age at first reproduction and investment in successive reproductive attempts are involved in mechanisms that can impede somatic repair, resulting in a decline in reproductive abilities with age (reproductive senescence). We used long-term data from the Black-legged Kittiwake, a long-lived seabird, to address the relationship between recruitment age, age-specific breeding success (BS), and reproductive senescence, while accounting for breeding experience and temporal variation in BS. We first detected late-life improvement in BS across all recruitment groups, which we recognized as "within-generation selection" or the selective disappearance of "frail" phenotypes.