David Green

Big thanks to my coauthors Sophie Bestley, Clive McMahon, Mary-Anne Lea, @robharcourt.bsky.social, Christophe Guinet and Mark Hindell, and of course @antarcticsciaus.bsky.social, @imos-aus.bsky.social, @imas-utas.bsky.social and @cebc-chizelab.bsky.social for making this work possible. (4/4)

This suggests a general response in which elephant seals perform, on average, shorter, steeper dives during periods of successful foraging - aligning with predictions from the marginal value theorem (MVT), that a forager stays in a patch only until gains drop below the neighbourhood mean. (3/4)

We found that as foraging success increased, seals increased transit (ascent, descent) rates and decreased relative dive durations for a given depth, with no response in surface recovery. And, importantly, this was consistent irrespective of sex and foraging habitat... (2/4)

This one was a marathon effort! We compared estimates of body condition change against a suite of dive metrics from >600 elephant seals to understand how these animals modify their dive behaviour when foraging successfully... (1/4)