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Shadowed By Scale: Subtle Behavioral Niche Partitioning In Two Sympatric, Tropical Breeding Albatross Species, Melinda Conners, Elliott Hazen, Daniel Costa, Scott A. Shaffer

Faculty Publications, Biological Sciences

Background To meet the minimum energetic requirements needed to support parents and their provisioned offspring, the timing of breeding in birds typically coincides with periods of high food abundance. Seasonality and synchrony of the reproductive cycle is especially important for marine species that breed in high latitudes with seasonal booms in ocean productivity. Laysan and black-footed albatrosses breeding in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands have a dual reliance on both seasonally productive waters of high latitudes and on nutrient-poor waters of low latitudes, because their foraging ranges contract during the short but critical brood-guard stage. Therefore, these species face an additional …