Tropical cyclones alter short-term activity patterns of a coastal seabird.

Autor: Wilkinson BP; 1Department of Forestry and Environmental Conservation, Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634 USA.; South Carolina Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, Clemson, SC 29634 USA., Satgé YG; 1Department of Forestry and Environmental Conservation, Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634 USA.; South Carolina Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, Clemson, SC 29634 USA., Lamb JS; 3Department of Natural Resource Science, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI 02881 USA., Jodice PGR; 4U.S. Geological Survey South Carolina Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, Clemson, Clemson, SC 29634 USA.; 1Department of Forestry and Environmental Conservation, Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634 USA.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Movement ecology [Mov Ecol] 2019 Oct 28; Vol. 7, pp. 30. Date of Electronic Publication: 2019 Oct 28 (Print Publication: 2019).
DOI: 10.1186/s40462-019-0178-0
Abstrakt: Background: Mobile organisms in marine environments are expected to modify their behavior in response to external stressors. Among environmental drivers of animal movement are long-term climatic indices influencing organism distribution and short-term meteorological events anticipated to alter acute movement behavior. However, few studies exist documenting the response of vagile species to meteorological anomalies in coastal and marine systems.
Methods: Here we examined the movements of Eastern brown pelicans ( Pelecanus occidentalis carolinensis ) in the South Atlantic Bight in response to the passage of three separate hurricane events in 2 years. Pelicans ( n  = 32) were tracked with GPS satellite transmitters from four colonies in coastal South Carolina, USA, for the entirety of at least one storm event. An Expectation Maximization binary Clustering algorithm was used to discretize pelican behavioral states, which were pooled into 'active' versus 'inactive' states. Multinomial logistic regression was used to assess behavioral state probabilities in relation to changes in barometric pressure and wind velocity.
Results: Individual pelicans were more likely to remain inactive during tropical cyclone passage compared to baseline conditions generally, although responses varied by hurricane. When inactive, pelicans tended to seek shelter using local geomorphological features along the coastline such as barrier islands and estuarine systems.
Conclusions: Our telemetry data showed that large subtropical seabirds such as pelicans may mitigate risk associated with spatially-extensive meteorological events by decreasing daily movements. Sheltering may be related to changes in barometric pressure and wind velocity, and represents a strategy common to several other classes of marine vertebrate predators for increasing survival probabilities.
Competing Interests: Competing interestsThe authors declare that they have no competing interests.
(© The Author(s). 2019.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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