Delord Karine

This Atlas is a summary of information on the use of the southern Indian Ocean by 22 seabirds and seals species (king penguin, gentoo penguin, Adélie penguin, eastern rockhopper penguin, northern rockhopper penguin, macaroni penguin, Amsterdam albatross, wandering albatross, black-browed albatross, Indian yellow-nosed albatross, light-mantled albatross, sooty albatross, southern giant petrel, northern giant petrel, southern fulmar, Cape petrel, snow petrel, white-chinned petrel, grey petrel, brown skua, southern elephant seal and Antarctic fur seal). The distribution map of each species was obtained by the use of tracking methods that allow identifying important areas in the southern Indian Ocean. The determination of zones of high species richness suggests several important areas for top predators. First the breeding colonies and surrounding zones: Amsterdam and Saint Paul Islands, Marion and Prince Edward islands and the Del Cano Rise, Crozet Islands, Kerguelen Plateau and East An...

ABSTRACT L e puffin des Baléares est une espèce classée « en danger critique d'extinc-tion » au niveau mondial par l'UICN depuis 2004, et « vulnérable » au niveau français (Liste rouge UICN France, mai 2011). Elle se reproduit uniquement sur les îles espagnoles de l'archipel des Baléares et est observée en grand nombre le long des côtes françaises après la reproduction, du milieu du printemps à la fin de l'hiver (Thébault et Yésou, 2014). Les oiseaux y effectuent une partie de leur mue et reconstituent leurs réserves énergétiques avant de retourner sur leur site de repro-duction. Bien connue dans ses grandes lignes, la migration du puffin des Baléares garde cependant des zones d'ombre, concernant notamment les trajets entre les zones de stationnement et la dispersion des oiseaux hors de vue des côtes. De plus, la distribution de ces oiseaux s'est modifiée avec une fréquence accrue en Manche, notamment en Bretagne et au large de la Cornouailles britannique (Wynn et al., 2007 ; Luczak et al., 2011). Les côtes françaises de la façade atlantique et de la Manche sont aujourd'hui un secteur clé pour l'espèce. Il devient dès lors fondamental de pouvoir déterminer assez précisément la distribution, le cycle saisonnier de présence et l'activité des oiseaux à cette échelle de son aire de répartition. Dans le cadre du projet européen Interreg FAME (Future of the Atlantic Marine Environment), coordonné en France par la LPO sur la période 2010-2014, pusieurs actions ont visé à approfondir les connaissances sur le puffin des Baléares.

The CCAMLR MPA Workshop on Marine Protected Areas, held in Brest (France) in August 2011, recommended that the Scientific Committee considers supporting three technical workshops including one specific to Planning Domain 5. Planning Domain 5 includes Marion and Prince Edward Islands, the Del Cano Rise and the Crozet Archipelago in the north. It also includes the Ob and Lena seamounts. The workshop focusing on Planning Domain 5 was held in St Pierre, La Reunion, France from 15th May to 18th May, 2012 at the headquarters of TAAF (French Southern and Antarctic Territories). It followed a meeting on the northern part of Planning Domain 5, which was held in South Africa in 2008, organized and funded by WWF South Africa and known as Del Cano 1. The intention of the CCAMLR workshop was to study the ecological values and the use of the marine environment and to identify possible threats that might occur in this area. It extended the Del Cano 1 study spatially and also ecologically to include the benthic and pelagic realms. Identification of objectives for Conservation Planning and future research were discussed in relation to national and international projects. Depending on the availability of data, the approach was based on mapping species distributions (either observed data or predictions for species or community presence/abundance based on environmental factors). Various national and international datasets were used including data from CCAMLR. However, South African and French data relevant to the Planning Domain 5 and surrounding domains were a major focus in the workshop because these CCAMLR member nations are the major scientific actors in this region. Species distributions were visualized by the mean of a Geographic Information System. Available Norwegian data from the Bouvetoya region were also discussed, but this region is less studied compared to the Planning Domain 5. The workshop provided benthic and pelagic abiotic classifications of the Planning Domain using geographic and oceanographic features. Distributions of plankton, mesopelagic fish and top predators were consistent with the abiotic regionalization showing latitudinal patterns of communities for the pelagic species. The importance of frontal zones such as the Antarctic Polar Front and especially the Subantarctic Front were highlighted. North of the CCAMLR area, the Agulhas Return Current has a strong influence on this region. The latitudinal zonation of bioregions according to frontal zones may be influenced by climate change. This will have consequences for marine bird and mammal populations as it will change the habitat of their main pelagic prey species (e.g. euphausiids, squids, mesopelagic fish, etc.). The working group concluded that ecoregionalisation has to be conducted at the scale of plateaus which includes Prince Edward Islands, Del Cano Rise and Crozet Islands i.e. a more detailed level than what has been done to date. High productive pelagic areas must be considered in relation to the bathymetry, iron enrichment, fronts and island mass effects, which contrast with high nutrient low chlorophyll areas farther south. Ichtyofauna and benthos were described as being characteristic of the subantarctic zone with some species being endemic. However, cryptic benthic species have not yet been studied. The French and South African islands support substantial colonies of seabirds and seals, which for several species have global importance. For example, the Crozet and Prince Edward Islands together host the entire population of Crozet shag, about 70% of the world population of wandering albatross, 54% of king penguin, 33% of Indian yellow-nosed albatross, 33% of subantarctic fur seal, 27% of sooty albatross and 21% of the world’s southern rockhopper penguin. The high productivity in the vicinity of the islands, together with the large aggregations of seabirds and seals found at the islands, attract various other animals, e.g. several cetaceans, to their vicinity. The populations of several seabirds that breed at the islands have decreased. There is accumulating evidence that decreases of albatrosses and petrels have been substantially influenced by by-catch mortality in fisheries, whereas decreases in some penguins are probably attributable to decreased availability of prey that may have been caused by environmental change. Although the islands themselves enjoy a protected status and fishing is at present excluded within 12 nautical miles of the islands, providing some protection to inshore-foraging species, many of the seabirds and seals range well beyond the immediate precincts of the islands. Some circumnavigate Antarctica and others move to the north well beyond the CCAMLR convention area. Hence, many seabirds and seals are affected by human activities, and almost certainly environmental change, in other CCAMLR domains as well as in regions of the high seas that are administered by other Regional Fisheries Management Organisations. In…

Long-term demographic studies have recently shown that global climate change together with increasing direct impacts of human activities, such as fisheries, are affecting the population dynamics of marine top predators. However, the effects of these factors on ...

Pelagic seabirds exploit large areas of ocean when acting as central‐place foragers during the breeding season, and ranges are even more extensive outside the breeding period. Spatial niche partitioning is known to occur among species that breed sympatrically, but is less apparent during the non‐breeding period when there is increased potential for overlap among closely related species from neighbouring island groups. This applies to several species of prion, Pachyptila spp., in the Southern Ocean; although extremely abundant, their at‐sea distribution was virtually unknown because they are difficult to distinguish while at sea. To understand spatial niche partitioning at large scales, we investigated the year‐round distribution of thin‐billed prions (Pachyptila belcheri) from the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas) and Antarctic prions (Pachyptila desolata) from South Georgia.

Incidental mortality of seabirds on fishing vessels is well docu-mented and there is mounting evidence that longline fishing is a major cause of observed decrease of albatross and petrel popula-tions (Brothers, 1991). interactions with fishery activities often have lethal consequences and assessing the magnitude of these potential interactions is therefore a priority. the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic marine living resources (CCAm-lr), the Agreement on the Conservation of Albatross and Petrels (ACAP), the southern indian ocean Fisheries Agreement (sioFA), and BirdLife International thus recommend a better identification of overlapping areas between seabirds and fisheries, and an assess-ment of interactions likely to induce incidental mortality on as fine a spatio-temporal scale as possible. this can be achieved through the use of remote telemetry to identify seabird distributions, along with data on the distribution of commercial fishing effort (Weim-erskirch, 1998) t...

Our understanding of demographic processes is mainly based on analyses of traits from the adult component of populations. Early-life demographic traits are poorly known mainly for methodological reasons. Yet, survival of juvenile and immature individuals is critical for the recruitment into the population and thus for the whole population dynamic, especially for long-lived species. This bias currently restrains our ability to fully understand population dynamics of long-lived species and life-history theory. The goal of this study was to estimate the early-life demographic parameters of a long-lived species with a long immature period (9-10 years), to test for sex and age effects on these parameters and to identify the environmental factors encountered during the period of immaturity that may influence survival and recruitment. Using capture-mark-recapture multievent models allowing us to deal with uncertain and unobservable individual states, we analysed a long-term data set of wandering albatrosses to estimate both age- and sex-specific early-life survival and recruitment. We investigated environmental factors potentially driving these demographic traits using climatic and fisheries covariates and tested for density dependence. Our study provides for the first time an estimate of annual survival during the first 2 years at sea for an albatross species (0·801 ± 0·014). Both age and sex affected early-life survival and recruitment processes of this long-lived seabird species. Early-life survival and recruitment were highly variable across years although the sensitivity of young birds to environmental variability decreased with age. Early-life survival was negatively associated with sea surface temperature, and recruitment rate was positively related to both Southern Annular Mode and sea surface temperature. We found strong evidence for density-dependent mortality of juveniles. Population size explained 41% of the variation of this parameter over the study period. These results indicate that early-life survival and recruitment were strongly age and sex dependent in a dimorphic long-lived species. In addition, early-life demographic parameters were affected by natal environmental conditions and by environmental conditions faced during the period of immaturity. Finally, our results constitute one of the first demonstrations of density dependence on juvenile survival in seabirds, with major consequences for our understanding of population dynamics in seabirds.

Seabirds are top predators of the marine environment that accumulate contaminants over a long life-span. Chronic exposure to pollutants is thought to compromise survival rate and long-term reproductive outputs in these long-lived organisms, thus inducing population decline. However, the demographic consequences of contaminant exposure are largely theoretical because of the dearth of long-term datasets. This study aims to test whether adult survival rate, return to the colony and long-term breeding performance were related to blood mercury (Hg), cadmium (Cd) and persistent organic pollutants (POPs), by using a capture-mark-recapture dataset on the vulnerable wandering albatross Diomedea exulans. We did not find evidence for any effect of contaminants on adult survival probability. However, blood Hg and POPs negatively impacted long-term breeding probability, hatching and fledging probabilities. The proximate mechanisms underlying these deleterious effects are likely multifaceted, through physiological perturbations and interactions with reproductive costs. Using matrix population models, we projected a demographic decline in response to an increase in Hg or POPs concentrations. This decline in population growth rate could be exacerbated by other anthropogenic perturbations, such as climate change, disease and fishery bycatch. This study gives a new dimension to the overall picture of environmental threats to wildlife populations.