Long-term studies should provide structure for inclusive education and professional development.

Long-term studies are critical for ecological understanding, but they are underutilized as inclusive opportunities for training ecologists. We use our perspective from the Año Nuevo elephant seal programme along with surveys from community members to propose that long-term studies could be better leveraged to promote inclusive education and professional development in ecology. Drawing on our experiences as mentors and mentees, we demonstrate how long-term studies can use their resources, including rich data, robust logistics and extensive professional networks, to improve recruitment and retention of diverse groups of trainees.

Two decades of three-dimensional movement data from adult female northern elephant seals.

Northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris) have been integral to the development and progress of biologging technology and movement data analysis, which continue to improve our understanding of this and other species. Adult female elephant seals at Año Nuevo Reserve and other colonies along the west coast of North America were tracked annually from 2004 to 2020, resulting in a total of 653 instrument deployments. This paper outlines the compilation and curation process of these high-resolution diving and location data, now accessible in two Dryad repositories.

Reproductive success and offspring survival decline for female elephant seals past prime age.

Maternal age can influence reproductive success and offspring fitness, but the timing, magnitude and direction of those impacts are not well understood. Evolutionary theory predicts that selection on fertility senescence is stronger than maternal effect senescence, and therefore, the rate of maternal effect senescence will be faster than fertility senescence. We used a 36-year study of northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris) to investigate reproductive senescence.

Maximizing biological insights from instruments attached to animals.

Instruments attached to animals ('biologgers') have facilitated extensive discoveries about the patterns, causes, and consequences of animal behavior. Here, we present examples of how biologging can deepen our fundamental understanding of ecosystems and our applied understanding of global change impacts by enabling tests of ecological theory. Applying the iterative process of science to biologging has enabled a diverse set of insights, including social and experiential learning in long-distance migrants, state-dependent risk aversion in foraging predators, and resource abundance driving movement across taxa.