Foraging is a fundamental animal behaviour but how it is shaped by social and personal information is not fully understood. In marine systems, this is particularly important given the challenges of finding food across the expanse of open seas. Here, some marine predators not only use social information, but also exhibit a high degree of individual foraging specialisation, including in traits such as site use and diet selection. This represents an apparent paradox when social information use could potentially reduce individual specialisation. Thus, it is unknown how these two processes interact to shape current and future foraging behaviour. For instance, can some animals become specialised in terms of social information use, or does group foraging erode individual specialisation? Understanding how foraging tactics influence prey detection in highly dynamic environments is central to knowledge of ecological processes, and is essential for effective conservation with implications for society and economies associated with reliance on healthy ecosystems.
This project’s main objective was to determine the interplay between social and learned foraging behaviours, and levels of specialisation in habitat use and diet, across an ecologically important group of seabirds (the Sulids – boobies and gannets) that live in a range of environments. It aimed to use coupled GPS and bird-borne video data from tracked birds to quantify the prevalence of group and solitary foraging in species representative of tropical and temperate environments, and link behaviour to foraging success. The project also aimed to undertake a family-scale comparison of specialisation in seabirds by using long-term tracking data from multiple species and populations. Through these focused analyses of foraging, it was hoped that the research action would enable predictions to be made about the adaptive capabilities of populations to environmental change, thus aligning with EU environmental priorities. This global, interdisciplinary project also aimed to deliver high levels of knowledge exchange, foster international collaboration, and maximise the experienced researcher’s professional development.
The project only ran for 9 months before the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic inhibited mobility to Australia, leading to a termination of the research activity. However, in this time, career development and data management plans were created, fieldwork was planned and undertaken in the Caribbean as global mobility allowed, and existing GPS, video and acoustic datasets were processed and analysed. These provided insights into brown booby commensal and social foraging interactions between conspecifics, other seabirds and fish, revealing the importance of dynamic oceanic features such as sargassum drifts as foraging cues. Furthermore, initial analyses identified the potential of video data for validating behavioural estimates obtained from other more widely available data streams. The experienced researcher built new international collaborations and field sites, and generated novel supplementary fine-scale data on foraging movements of magnificent frigatebirds from a previously untracked population, which can generate a stand-alone scientific publication in the future.
