What is it about?
Seabirds can breed in very large colonies, sometimes consisting of many thousand pairs. Seabird ecologists have long been interested in what regulates the size of such colonies. We present a mathematical model that studies how behavioural decisions of seabirds about where to forage for fish affect the distribution of fish around their breeding colony, and how this, in turn, regulates the size of bird populations. Most importantly, we explain how different bird species breeding in the same colony and eating the same resource can coexist by partitioning the foraging grounds around the colony. This partitioning emerges naturally whenever species differ in their ability to catch prey and their flight efficiency.
Featured Image
Photo by Kristin Snippe on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Our research helps to better understand the dynamics of an ecosystem, colonial seabirds and their prey, that has a great fascination for people and that is threatened by human activities at many different levels.
Perspectives
The life of colonial seabirds is fascinating: roaming the oceans for most of the year but tight to a colony, often on islands, during breeding. We were stunned that we were able to develop a mathematical model that in a very elegant manner explains several features of seabird colonies: what determines the size of breeding colonies (it is usually not the space on the island), and how can different species of seabirds coexist in a colony despite foraging on the same prey - an observation that is at odds with standard ecological theory.
Claus Rueffler
Uppsala Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Central place foragers, prey depletion halos, and how behavioral niche partitioning promotes consumer coexistence, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2411780121.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
