Abstract
Information about foraging speeds is particularly valuable when the impact of a predator species upon a community of prey has to be defined, as in the case of great cormorants. We measured the swim speed of 12 (six males and six females) free-ranging great cormorants Phalacrocorax carbo, foraging off the Greenland coast during the summer of 2003, using miniaturized data-loggers. Although mean body mass of males was 27% greater than that of females, and mean swim speed of males were 29–57% higher than that of females during foraging phases (but not descent phases) of dives, these differences in speeds were not significant due to high variances. Birds descended to the mean maximum depth of 4.7 m at an average speed of 1.6±0.5 m s−1, a speed similar to that measured in captive cormorants in previous studies. Although bursts of up to 4 m s−1 were recorded, speed usually decreased during the deepest (foraging) phase of dives, being on average 0.8±0.6 m s−1. Speeds measured here should be taken with caution, because the large propeller loggers used to measure speed directly decreased descent speeds by up to 0.5 m s−1 when compared to smaller depth-only loggers. Cormorants in Greenland seem to combine two searching strategies, one requiring low speed to scan the water column or benthos, and one requiring high speed to pursue prey. These two strategies depend on the two main habitats of their prey: pelagic or demersal.
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Acknowledgements
This study was funded by the Institut Polaire Français Paul-Emile Victor through the Grant N°388 to DG and by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. The Arctic Station in Godhavn provided logistics support throughout repeated field seasons on Disko. The experiments comply with the current laws of Greenland and the experimental procedure was validated by the ethics committee of the French Polar Institute, The Greenland Homerule Government, the Danish veterinary services, the Danish Polar Center, and the science board of Arctic station. We thank C. Gilbert, E. Pettex, C. Devred and G. Bastholm for their help in data collection; J. Metcalfe, I. Russell, R. Williams and A. Jordan for sharing information about fish swim speed; Prof. Y. Naito for kindly providing us with the swim speed data loggers. Finally, three anonymous referees considerably helped us improving the manuscript.
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Communicated by S. Nishida, Tokyo
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Ropert-Coudert, Y., Grémillet, D. & Kato, A. Swim speeds of free-ranging great cormorants. Mar Biol 149, 415–422 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-005-0242-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-005-0242-8