SGER: Analysis and Modeling of Albatross Foraging Behaviors

R. Veit OPP99-08624D。Grunbaum OPP 99 - 08623南极海鸟，如黑眉信天翁，在长达数天和数千公里的觅食旅程中获得必要的资源。 这些觅食旅行的成功主要受到感官限制的限制，限制了对猎物的检测相对较短的范围。 为了克服这种感官上的限制，abatrasses使用以前觅食地点的记忆和对目前遇到的猎物分布的短期反应的组合。 我们已经定量描述了黑眉信天翁的两种短期行为，区域限制搜索和局部增强。 我们假设这些行为是信天翁空间觅食动态中长期、大规模模式的基本决定因素。 如果我们是正确的，那么短期的，船上的观察加上详细的空间明确的觅食行为模型将有重要的预测能力信天翁觅食的地方，他们是多么成功，以及这种成功如何受到猎物分布的短期和长期变化的影响。 我们建议首先通过构建一个空间上明确的觅食行为模型来测试我们的假设，该模型基于对我们自己的游轮和文献中现有行为数据的广泛重新分析。 该模型将利用新开发的数学技术，这些复杂的个人层面的行为，从他们导致海鸟种群的时空分布。 这项工作的主要目标是创建和传播一个灵活的建模结构，使用该结构来确定我们观察到的行为是否是海鸟觅食地点的定量重要决定因素，并确定最重要的行为和环境数据以收集未来的巡航。 如果该模型支持我们的假设，这项工作将激励未来的研究，我们明确测试我们的预测与卫星跟踪，船上和殖民地为基础的观察。 如果假设不被支持，我们的工作将集中注意力在行为的替代成分，并提供一个理论结构来调查他们。 在任何一种情况下，这种理论分析是一个重要的第一步，在南极海鸟的空间觅食动力学实现了一个基于解剖学的，定量的了解。

R. Veit OPP99-08624D. Grunbaum OPP99-08623Antarctic seabirds such as Black-browed Albatrosses acquire essential resources on foraging trips that span many days and thousands of kilometers. The success of these foraging excursions is primarily limited by sensory limitations that restrict detection of prey to relatively short ranges. To overcome this sensory limitation, abatrosses use a combination of memory of previous foraging locations and short-term responses to the prey distributions they are presently encountering. We have already quantitatively characterized two of these short-term behaviors, area-restricted search and local enhancement, in Black-browed Albatrosses. We hypothesize that these behaviors are fundamental determinants of long-term, large-scale patterns in the albatross' spatial foraging dynamics. If we are correct, then short-term, ship-board observations coupled with detailed spatially explicit models of foraging behaviors will have important predictive power for where albatrosses forage, how successful they are, and how that success is affected by short- and long-term changes in prey distribution. We propose to test our hypothesis initially by constructing a spatially explicit model of foraging behavior, based on extensive reanalysis of existing behavioral data from our own cruises and from the literature. The model will take advantage of newly developed mathematical techniques to relate these complex individual-level behaviors to the spatio-temporal distributions of seabird populations that result from them. The primary goals of this work are to create and disseminate a flexible modeling structure, to use that structure to establish whether the behaviors we have observed are quantitatively important determinants of where seabirds forage, and to identify the most essential behavioral and environmental data to collect on future cruises. If the model supports our hypothesis, this work will motivate future studies in which we explicitly test our predictions with satellite tracking, ship-board and colony-based observations. If the hypothesis is not supported, our work will focus attention on alternative components of behavior and provide a theoretical structure to investigate them. In either case, this theoretical analysis is an essential first step in attaining an empirically-based, quantitative understanding of spatial foraging dynamics in Antarctic seabirds.