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Article Dans Une Revue Marine Ecology Progress Series Année : 2014

Foraging behaviour of southern elephant seals over the Kerguelen Plateau

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A total of 79 (37 juvenile male, 42 adult female) southern elephant seals Mirounga leonina from the Kerguelen Islands were tracked between 2004 and 2009. Area-restricted search patterns and dive behaviour were established from location data gathered by CTD satelliterelayed data loggers. At-sea movements of the seals demonstrated that >40% of the juvenile elephant seal population tagged use the Kerguelen Plateau during the austral winter. Search activity increased where temperature at 200 m depth was lower, when closer to the shelf break, and, to a lesser extent, where sea-surface height anomalies were higher. However, while this model explained the observed data (F1,242 = 88.23, p < 0.0001), bootstrap analysis revealed poor predictive capacity (r2 = 0.264). There appears to be potential overlap between the seals and commercial fishing operations in the region. This study may therefore support ecosystem-based fisheries management of the region, with the aim of maintaining ecological integrity of the shelf.
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hal-00998949 , version 1 (07-09-2021)

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Malcolm O'Toole, Mark A. Hindell, Jean-Benoit Charrassin, Christophe Guinet. Foraging behaviour of southern elephant seals over the Kerguelen Plateau. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 2014, 502, pp.281-294. ⟨10.3354/meps10709⟩. ⟨hal-00998949⟩
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