Tim Reid

How do seabirds make foraging decisions: an analysis of behaviour in the flesh-footed shearwater

Supervisors: Assoc/Prof Mark Hindell and Dr Chris Wilcox

This project will focus on developing and testing conceptual models of seabird foraging. We will utilize data on ocean conditions available through CSIRO's Bluelink project to develop statistical models linking shearwater foraging locations to oceanographic characteristics, including ocean fronts, and benthic features such as seamounts. We will then test conceptual models of shearwater foraging, nested within these habitat-based models. The conceptual models will describe alternative hypotheses about ecological and evolutionary aspects of shearwater foraging behaviour. This combination of the use of new technologies, including hindcasting of oceanographic conditions at very fine spatial scales and deployment of very small highly accurate tracking systems for marine species, with new statistical approaches for analysis of these data, such as Bayesian spatial statistics and hidden Markov models, creates an exciting opportunity to do novel and highly quantitative science.