Individual consistency in the localised foraging behaviour of shy albatross ().

Quantifying the intra- and interindividual variation that exists within a population can provide meaningful insights into a population's vulnerability and response to rapid environmental change. We characterise the foraging behaviour of 308 trips taken by 96 shy albatross () from Albatross Island across seven consecutive years. At a population level, incubating shy albatross exploited a consistent area within ca.

Independent evolution of intermediate bill widths in a seabird clade.

Interspecific introgression can occur between species that evolve rapidly within an adaptive radiation. Pachyptila petrels differ in bill size and are characterised by incomplete reproductive isolation, leading to interspecific gene flow. Salvin's prion (Pachyptila salvini), whose bill width is intermediate between broad-billed (P.

Introduced species and extreme weather as key drivers of reproductive output in three sympatric albatrosses.

Invasive species present a major conservation threat globally and nowhere are their affects more pronounced than in island ecosystems. Determining how native island populations respond demographically to invasive species can provide information to mitigate the negative effects of invasive species. Using 20 years of mark-recapture data from three sympatric species of albatrosses (black-browed Thalassarche melanophris, grey-headed T.

Tracking of marine predators to protect Southern Ocean ecosystems.

Southern Ocean ecosystems are under pressure from resource exploitation and climate change. Mitigation requires the identification and protection of Areas of Ecological Significance (AESs), which have so far not been determined at the ocean-basin scale. Here, using assemblage-level tracking of marine predators, we identify AESs for this globally important region and assess current threats and protection levels.

High occurrence of jellyfish predation by black-browed and Campbell albatross identified by DNA metabarcoding.

Gelatinous zooplankton are a large component of the animal biomass in all marine environments, but are considered to be uncommon in the diet of most marine top predators. However, the diets of key predator groups like seabirds have conventionally been assessed from stomach content analyses, which cannot detect most gelatinous prey. As marine top predators are used to identify changes in the overall species composition of marine ecosystems, such biases in dietary assessment may impact our detection of important ecosystem regime shifts.

Decadal changes in habitat characteristics influence population trajectories of southern elephant seals.

Understanding divergent biological responses to climate change is important for predicting ecosystem level consequences. We use species habitat models to predict the winter foraging habitats of female southern elephant seals and investigate how changes in environmental variables within these habitats may be related to observed decreases in the Macquarie Island population. There were three main groups of seals that specialized in different ocean realms (the sub-Antarctic, the Ross Sea and the Victoria Land Coast).

Effects of Climate Change and Fisheries Bycatch on Shy Albatross (Thalassarche cauta) in Southern Australia.

The impacts of climate change on marine species are often compounded by other stressors that make direct attribution and prediction difficult. Shy albatrosses (Thalassarche cauta) breeding on Albatross Island, Tasmania, show an unusually restricted foraging range, allowing easier discrimination between the influence of non-climate stressors (fisheries bycatch) and environmental variation. Local environmental conditions (rainfall, air temperature, and sea-surface height, an indicator of upwelling) during the vulnerable chick-rearing stage, have been correlated with breeding success of shy albatrosses.

Evolutionary factors affecting the cross-species utility of newly developed microsatellite markers in seabirds.

Microsatellite loci are ideal for testing hypotheses relating to genetic segregation at fine spatio-temporal scales. They are also conserved among closely related species, making them potentially useful for clarifying interspecific relationships between recently diverged taxa. However, mutations at primer binding sites may lead to increased nonamplification, or disruptions that may result in decreased polymorphism in nontarget species.

Satellites, the all-seeing eyes in the sky: counting elephant seals from space.

Regular censuses are fundamental for the management of animal populations but, are logistically challenging for species living in remote regions. The advent of readily accessible, high resolution satellite images of earth mean that it is possible to resolve relatively small (0.6 m) objects, sufficient to discern large animals.

Bottom-up regulation of a pole-ward migratory predator population.

As the effects of regional climate change are most pronounced at polar latitudes, we might expect polar-ward migratory populations to respond as habitat suitability changes. The southern elephant seal (Mirounga leonina L.) is a pole-ward migratory species whose populations have mostly stabilized or increased in the past decade, the one exception being the Macquarie Island population which has decreased continuously over the past 50 years.