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Modelling and mapping how common guillemots balance their energy budgets over a full annual cycle

Dunn, Ruth E; Green, Jonathan A; Wanless, Sarah; Harris, Mike P; Newell, Mark A; Bogdanova, Maria I; Horswill, Catharine; ... Matthiopoulos, Jason; + view all (2022) Modelling and mapping how common guillemots balance their energy budgets over a full annual cycle. Functional Ecology 10.1111/1365-2435.14059. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

The ability of individual animals to balance their energy budgets throughout the annual cycle is important for their survival, reproduction and population dynamics. However, the annual cycles of many wild, mobile animals are difficult to observe and our understanding of how individuals balance their energy budgets throughout the year therefore remains poor. We developed a hierarchical Bayesian state-space model to investigate how key components of animal energy budgets (namely individual energy gain and storage) varied in space and time. Our model used biologger-derived estimates of time-activity budgets, locations and energy expenditure to infer year-round time series of energy income and reserves. The model accounted for seasonality in environmental drivers such as sea surface temperature and daylength, allowing us to identify times and locations of high energy gain. Our study system was a population of common guillemots Uria aalge breeding at a western North Sea colony. These seabirds manage their energy budgets by adjusting their behaviour and accumulating fat reserves. However, typically during severe weather conditions, birds can experience an energy deficit over a sustained period, leading to starvation and large-scale mortality events. We show that guillemot energy gain varied in both time and space. Estimates of guillemot body mass varied throughout the annual cycle and birds periodically experienced losses in mass. Mass losses were likely to have either been adaptive, or due to energetic bottlenecks, the latter leading to increased susceptibility to mortality. Guillemots tended to be lighter towards the edge of their spatial distribution. We describe a framework that combines biologging data, time-activity budget analysis and Bayesian state-space modelling to identify times and locations of high energetic reward or potential energetic bottlenecks in a wild animal population. Our approach can be extended to address ecological and conservation-driven questions that were previously unanswerable due to logistical complexities in collecting data on wild, mobile animals across full annual cycles.

Type: Article
Title: Modelling and mapping how common guillemots balance their energy budgets over a full annual cycle
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.14059
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.14059
Language: English
Additional information: © 2022 The Authors. Functional Ecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords: Bayesian, energetic bottleneck, energyscape, full annual cycle, seabird, state-space model, Uria aalge
UCL classification: UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Genetics, Evolution and Environment
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10148454
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