Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2009
Publication Title
PLoS One
Volume
4
Issue Number
10
First Page
e7624
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0007623
Disciplines
Biology | Marine Biology
Abstract
When searching for prey, animals should maximize energetic gain, while minimizing energy expenditure by altering their movements relative to prey availability. However, with increasing amounts of marine debris, what once may have been ‘optimal’ foraging strategies for top marine predators, are leading to sub-optimal diets comprised in large part of plastic. Indeed, the highly vagile Laysan albatross (Phoebastria immutabilis) which forages throughout the North Pacific, are well known for their tendency to ingest plastic. Here we examine whether Laysan albatrosses nesting on Kure Atoll and Oahu Island, 2,150 km apart, experience different levels of plastic ingestion. Twenty two geolocators were deployed on breeding adults for up to two years. Regurgitated boluses of undigestable material were also collected from chicks at each site to compare the amount of plastic vs. natural foods. Chicks from Kure Atoll were fed almost ten times the amount of plastic compared to chicks from Oahu despite boluses from both colonies having similar amounts of natural food. Tracking data indicated that adults from either colony did not have core overlapping distributions during the early half of the breeding period and that adults from Kure had a greater overlap with the putative range of the Western Garbage Patch corroborating our observation of higher plastic loads at this colony. At-sea distributions also varied throughout the year suggesting that Laysan albatrosses either adjusted their foraging behavior according to constraints on time away from the nest or to variation in resources. However, in the non-breeding season, distributional overlap was greater indicating that the energy required to reach the foraging grounds was less important than the total energy available. These results demonstrate how a marine predator that is not dispersal limited alters its foraging strategy throughout the reproductive cycle to maximize energetic gain and how this has led to differences in plastic ingestion.
Recommended Citation
L C. Young, C Vanderlip, D C. Duffy, V Afanasyev, and Scott A. Shaffer. "Bringing home the trash: do differences in foraging lead to increased plastic ingestion in Laysan Albatrosses?" PLoS One (2009): e7624. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0007623
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Comments
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons–Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Citation: Young LC, Vanderlip C, Duffy DC, Afanasyev V, Shaffer SA (2009) Bringing Home the Trash: Do Colony-Based Differences in Foraging Distribution Lead to Increased Plastic Ingestion in Laysan Albatrosses? PLoS ONE 4(10): e7623. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007623.