Résumé
Although assessments of winter carryover effects on fitness-related breeding parameters are vital for determining the links between environmental variation and fitness, direct methods of determining overwintering distributions (e.g., electronic tracking) can be expensive, limiting the number of individuals studied. Alternatively, stable isotope analysis in specific tissues can be used as an indirect means of determining individual overwintering areas of residency. Although increasingly used to infer the overwintering distributions of terrestrial birds, stable isotopes have been used less often to infer overwintering areas of marine birds. Using Arctic-breeding common eiders, we test the effectiveness of an integrated stable isotope approach (13-carbon, 15-nitrogen, and 2-hydrogen) to infer overwintering locations. Knowing the overwinter destinations of eiders from tracking studies at our study colony at East Bay Island, Nunavut, we sampled claw and blood tissues at two known overwintering locations, Nuuk, Greenland, and Newfoundland, Canada. These two locations yielded distinct tissue-specific isotopic profiles. We then compared the isotope profiles of tissues col-lected from eiders upon their arrival at our breeding colony, and used a k-means cluster analysis approach to match arriving eiders to an overwintering group. Samples from the claws of eiders were most effective for determining overwinter origin, due to this tissue’s slow growth rate relative to the 40-day turnover rate of blood. Despite taking an integrative approach using multiple isotopes, k-means cluster analysis was most effective when using 13-carbon alone to assign eiders to an overwintering group. Our research demonstrates that it is possible to use stable isotope analysis to assign an overwintering location to a marine bird. There are few examples of the effective use of this technique on a marine bird at this scale; we provide a framework for apply-ing this technique to detect changes in the migration phenology of birds’ responses to rapid changes in the Arctic.
| Langue d'origine | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (de-à) | 8742-8752 |
| Nombre de pages | 11 |
| Journal | Ecology and Evolution |
| Volume | 7 |
| Numéro de publication | 21 |
| DOI | |
| Statut de publication | Published - nov. 2017 |
Note bibliographique
Funding Information:Canada Excellence Research Chairs, Government of Canada; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada; Canada Research Chairs Program; Northern Scientific Training Program, Greenland Institute of Natural Resources; Polar Continental Shelf Program
Funding Information:
We would like to thank the 2014 and 2015 East Bay field crew for data collection, fishermen near Nuuk, Greenland, hunters in Newfoundland, Canada, and S. Wilhelm for providing winter eider samples, A. Vueltich and C. Jean for help with stable isotope analysis, and P. Ryan, J. Nakoolak, and J. Angootealuk for essential help in the field. We are grateful to I. Butler for data management and M. Janssen for coordinating fieldwork. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. Dissection laboratories were graciously offered by the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources and Environment and Climate Change Canada (Mt. Pearle and Ottawa). This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Discovery, Northern Supplement, and Graduate Scholarship Award programs), the Canada Research Chairs Program, the Northern Scientific Training Program, Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, and the Polar Continental Shelf Program.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
ASJC Scopus Subject Areas
- Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
- Ecology
- Nature and Landscape Conservation
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