Abstract
Predicting the impacts of changing environments on phenotypes in wild populations remains a challenge. Growth, a trait that frequently influences fitness, is difficult to study as it is influenced by many environmental variables. To address this, we used a sliding window approach to determine the time windows when sea-surface and air temperatures have the potential to affect growth of black-legged kittiwakes (Rissa tridactyla) on a colony in the Northeast Pacific. We examined environmental drivers influencing nestling growth using data from a long-term (21-year) study, that food supplements a portion of the colony. The associations between kittiwake growth and climatic conditions in our study indicated that warmer environmental conditions can both positively and negatively impact nestling growth parameters depending on hatching order. We found that first-hatched nestlings had a heavier maximum mass under warm air temperatures and cold sea conditions. Warmer air temperatures negatively affected the second-hatched nestling in a brood. However, when air temperatures were warm, warmer sea-surface temperatures predicted heavy, fast-growing second-hatched nestlings in contrast to what we observed for first-hatched nestlings. Food supplementation alleviated the temperature effects, and competition among nestlings influenced how strongly a variable affected growth. We identified windows that might indicate specific biological pathways through which environmental variation affected growth directly or indirectly. Overall, our windows suggest that nestlings in shared nests will be most affected by warming conditions.
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The data are available from figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16734874.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Suzanne Bonamour, Rob Colautti, Troy Day, Maria Moirón, the Friesen lab at Queen’s and the E3CO team at CEFE for helpful discussion. Thank you to the numerous field researchers on Middleton Island for years of data collection. We thank Indrikis Krams and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments that improved the manuscript.
Funding
Funds for this research were provided by an NSERC Strategic Projects Grant (Grant # 493789‐16) to VLF, an NSERC CGSD3 Scholarship, a TD Fellowship in Arctic Environmental Issues, Northern Studies Training Program grant, and Queen's University Graduate Awards to DS.
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DS, AC, SAH, and VLF conceived the ideas and designed methodology; SAH oversaw collection of the data; DS analysed the data; DS led the writing of the manuscript. All authors contributed critically to the drafts, gave final approval for publication, and declare no conflict of interests.
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Research was conducted under the approval of the USGS Alaska Science Center IACUC, in accordance with United States laws and under permits from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the State of Alaska.
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Communicated by Christopher Whelan.
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Sauve, D., Charmantier, A., Hatch, S.A. et al. Environmental conditions variably affect growth across the breeding season in a subarctic seabird. Oecologia 198, 307–318 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-05063-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-05063-x