University of Tasmania, Australia

Drivers of site fidelity in land-based penguins and seals.

Level: PhD

What are the drivers of site fidelity and can you estimate the degree of fidelity in naturally colonial species (seals, penguins)?

Seals and penguins are considered to have high fidelity for breeding colonies.  The most recent explanation of colonisation of new sites is that when conditions are poor the juveniles will recruit to breeding populations at new sites (how is this done) and the adults at existing colonies will remain faithful to the site (wait for conditions to recover or die if the conditions don’t recover). 

This is an interesting hypothesis that has ramifications for managing krill fisheries as well as understanding the response of land-based colonial species to climate change impacts on their feeding/breeding areas.  Most of the conclusions on this hypothesis have been drawn from tagged/banded animals.  It would be interesting to explore the use of genetics in this question and whether it could be used to estimate rates of exchange between colonies etc.  Mark-recapture using genetics is something that has been developed for commercial fish stocks and could be easily applied here.  Similarly, people are using genetics to estimate connectivity on evolutionary time scales.  A great challenge now is what methods can be used to estimate connectivity of colonies in a metapopulation (ecological time scales).  This has been done for abalone but could be usefully extended to vertebrates.

There are a number of people in Hobart that could be tied in to such a project.

Nominal supervisor: Andrew Constable