Diving location and depth of breeding chinstrap penguins during incubationand chick-rearing period in King George Island, Antarctica

Abstract

Breeding birds can increase their foraging efforts to feed chicks after hatching. We investigated how chinstrap penguins (Pygoscelis antarctica) differ foraging diving behaviors with breeding stages. During incubation and chick-rearing period, from December 2015 to January 2016 on King George Island, Antarctica, diving characteristics of breeding chinstrap penguin parents were recorded by deploying GPS and Time-Depth Recorder (TDR). Our results showed that chinstrap penguins have wider-range diving areas and longer foraging trips during incubation period while they dive in on-shore areas for a short trip hours during chick-rearing period. In addition, chinstrap penguins exhibited deeper dive depths during chick-rearing than during incubation. Our results suggest that chinstrap parents change their foraging area and dive depth between incubation and chick-rearing, possibly due to the increased need of chick-feeding and the temporal changes in prey availability between the two reproduction stages.