Life history and ecology of pinnipeds

我研究的长期目标是了解形成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，我和我的学生计划建立在我们对海豹生活史和觅食生态学的长期研究基础上。在繁殖性能的变异性内和个体之间在其生殖生命已被记录为相对较少的大型长寿脊椎动物。性状的平均群体估计值掩盖了个体对环境变化的反应中潜在的重要变异性。我们计划使用来自>1450名单独标记的已知年龄女性的长期数据来调查个体变异性的来源（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）对繁殖性能的影响。我们还将使用品牌的男性和女性的重新定位数据来测试性别特异性的假设，在招聘和年龄特异性生存的年龄变化，以及生存模式如何随着人口丰度和环境变化而变化。虽然后代的大小经常被用作雌性和后代适应性的代表，但这一假设很少在大型哺乳动物中得到验证。测量了1998年至2002年出生的大约1200只永久标记的雌性灰海豹幼崽的大小和其他后代特征。我们测量了这些幼崽幸存者的尺寸和招募年龄，以测试后代尺寸，存活率和招募时的尺寸和年龄之间的关系。我们还将调查女性在哺乳期保护后代方面表现出的个性程度，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数据库的灰海豹卫星跟踪和个人估计的饮食和质量增益，以更好地了解觅食行为和生殖性能之间的关系。

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.