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Insights on dispersal and recruitment paradigms: sex- and age-dependent variations in a nomadic breeder

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A Correction to this article was published on 01 December 2017

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Abstract

Sex- and age-dependence in recruitment and dispersal are often explained by costs arising from competition for holding a breeding territory over the years—a typical feature of species living in stable habitats. For instance, long-lived birds with male territoriality often exhibit large variation in recruitment age and higher dispersal in females and young individuals. As a corollary, we expected that species with ephemeral habitat suitability, and hence nomadic breeding, would show weak age- and sex-dependence in dispersal and low variation in recruitment age, because territory ownership is not maintained over the years. In addition, the higher cost of reproduction in females might not be (over)compensated for by costs of territoriality in males. Accordingly, females would recruit later than males. We explored these variations using multievent capture–recapture models over 13 years, 3479 (2392 sexed) slender-billed gulls (Chroicocephalus genei) and 45 colony sites along the French Mediterranean coast. As expected, variability in recruitment age was low with males recruiting earlier than females. Nonetheless, dispersal in and out of the study area decreased with age and was slightly higher in males than in females. Decreased dispersal with age might result from foraging benefits associated with increased spatial familiarity. Higher dispersal in males might be explained by a male-biased sex ratio or higher philopatry benefits in females (arising from their higher cost of reproduction). Sex- and age-dependent dispersal and recruitment may thus occur in the absence of year-to-year breeding territory ownership, which stresses the importance of considering other processes in shaping recruitment and dispersal patterns.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the many volunteers, ringers, and students who assisted with captures and observations at the colonies, and in particular to Christophe Pin who has been instrumental in maintaining the ring-resighting effort on the long-term. We are also grateful to Roger Pradel for his useful advice about E-SURGE and multievent modelling. The monitoring of the slender-billed gull was funded by Tour du Valat, the non-profit organisation Les Amis du Marais du Vigueirat, and the MAVA foundation. This work was supported by the French Laboratory of Excellence project ‘TULIP’ (ANR-10-LABX-41; ANR-11-IDEX-0002-02).

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    Authors and Affiliations

    1. Laboratoire Évolution et Diversité Biologique (EDB) UMR 5174, Université Paul Sabatier, CNRS, ENSFEA, IRD, 118 Route de Narbonne, 31062, Toulouse, France

      Paul Acker

    2. CEFE UMR 5175, CNRS, PSL Research University, EPHE UM, SupAgro, IRD INRA, 1919 Route de Mende, 34293, Montpellier, France

      Paul Acker, Charlotte Francesiaz & Aurélien Besnard

    3. Centre de Recherche de la Tour du Valat, Le Sambuc, 13200, Arles, France

      Arnaud Béchet

    4. Les Amis des Marais du Vigueirat, Marais du Vigueirat, Mas Thibert, 13104, Arles, France

      Nicolas Sadoul

    5. Department of Animal Ecology, Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW), Postbus 50, 67000 AB, Wageningen, The Netherlands

      Catherine M. Lessells & Agata S. Pijl

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    1. Paul Acker
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    2. Charlotte Francesiaz
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    3. Arnaud Béchet
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    Contributions

    PA, CF, and A Besnard formulated the ideas; PA and CF performed the analyses and wrote the manuscript; NS conceived the monitoring study. NS and A Béchet were responsible for data collection; ASP performed genetic sexing; A Besnard, A Béchet, CML, and NS provided editorial advice.

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    Correspondence to Paul Acker.

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    Communicated by Hannu Pöysä.

    The original version of this article was revised: Table 1 and the contribution statement was incorrectly published in the original version and corrected here.

    Paul Acker and Charlotte Francesiaz have contributed equally to the work.

    A correction to this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-017-4001-6.

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    Acker, P., Francesiaz, C., Béchet, A. et al. Insights on dispersal and recruitment paradigms: sex- and age-dependent variations in a nomadic breeder. Oecologia 186, 85–97 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-017-3972-7

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