This two-year award in support of U.S.-France collaborative research in animal physiological ecology involves Daniel P. Costa of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Pierre Jouventin and Henri Weimerskirch of the Centre des Etudes Biologiques Cellulaires, Beauvoir-sur-Niort, France, and Peter Prince of the British Antarctic Survey. This NSF grant will principally support the participation of a US graduate student in field research in the French Antarctic islands in the Southern Ocean. The objective of the research is to investigate foraging and parental investment by wandering albatrosses or Diomedea Exulans. They will test the hypothesis that foraging intensity differs between long and short foraging bouts by measuring energy expenditure, body composition, and foraging behavior of adults on both types of trips.
Using the wandering albatross as a case study, the proposed investigations will test current life history theory that long-lived species incur few risks during reproduction and maintenance in order to maximize fitness over an entire life span. In essence, adults must differentially allocate resources between self-maintenance and reproduction and in some cases, this creates conflicts between adults and their offspring or between both caregivers. The US researcher and graduate student bring to this collaboration expertise in measurements of foraging and reproductive energetics. This is complemented by French expertise on the biology of albatrosses. It takes advantage of access to permanent stations in French Antarctica, a 30 year database on reproductive history and population dynamics of several albatross species and French and British advances in ARGOS satellite tagging of species.
