Life history and ecology of pinnipeds

我研究的长期目标是了解影响海豹觅食和繁殖策略的进化和生态因素。在接下来的五年里，我和我的学生们计划建立在我们对海豹生活史和觅食生态学的长期研究的基础上。在相对较少的大型长寿脊椎动物中，生殖表现在个体内部和个体之间的可变性已被记录。性状的平均种群估计模糊了个体对环境变化的反应中潜在的重要变异性。我们计划使用bbbb1450只单独标记的已知年龄雌性的长期数据来调查繁殖性能的个体差异来源（例如，当地繁殖密度、栖息地、身体状况、年龄、出生日期、断奶时后代大小）。我们还将使用标记雄性和雌性的重定向数据来测试关于招募年龄变化和年龄特异性生存的性别特异性假设，以及生存模式如何随着种群丰度和环境变异性的变化而变化。虽然后代的大小通常被用作雌性和后代健康的代表，但这种假设很少在大型哺乳动物中得到验证。研究人员对1998年至2002年出生的大约1200只带有永久标记的雌性灰海豹幼崽进行了体型和其他后代特征的测量。我们测量了这些幼崽的生还者在招募时的体型和年龄，以测试后代的体型、存活率以及招募时的体型和年龄之间的关系。我们还将研究雌性在哺乳期保护其后代方面表现出个性的程度，以及个性差异对生殖成功的影响。最后，我们将使用一个大型的灰海豹卫星轨迹数据库，以及对饮食和体重增加的个体估计，以更好地了解觅食行为和繁殖表现之间的关系。

The long-term objective of my research is to understand the evolutionary and ecological factors that have shaped the foraging and reproductive strategies of seals. During the next five years, my students and I to plan build upon our long-term studies of life history and foraging ecology of seals. Variability in reproductive performance within and among individuals over their reproductive life has been documented for relatively few large long-lived vertebrates. Mean population estimates of traits obscure potentially important variability in the response of individuals to environmental variation. We plan to use long-term data from >1450 individually marked, known-age females to investigate sources of individual variability (e.g., local breeding density, habitat, body condition, age, birth date, offspring size at weaning) in reproductive performance. We will also use resighting data of branded males and females to test sex-specific hypotheses about variation in age at recruitment and age-specific survival and how patterns of survival vary with changes in population abundance and environmental variability. Although offspring size is often used as a proxy for female and offspring fitness, this hypothesis has rarely been tested in large mammals. Size and other offspring traits were measured for about 1200 permanent-marked female grey seals pups that were born from 1998 to 2002. We have measured size and age at recruitment of the survivors of those pups to test the relationship between offspring size, survival and size and age at recruitment. We will also investigate the extent to which females exhibit personality with respect to the protection of their offspring during lactation and the consequences of differences in personality on reproductive success. Finally, we will use a large database of grey seals satellite tracks and individual estimates of diet and mass gain to better understand the relationship between foraging behaviour and reproductive performance.