Diving deeper into the underlying white shark behaviors at Guadalupe Island, Mexico

Abstract

How animals use a set of physical characteristics and resources in a habitat, together with the time over which they use them, is known as habitat use (Hall et al., 1997). Energy is the most precious asset in an ecosystem (Lawson et al., 2019), such that an animal must always be concerned with conserving it by balancing its acquisition and loss (MacArthur & Pianka, 1966) while minimizing predation risk (Bartumeus & Catalan, 2009). Consequently, animals must make different decisions throughout the day, optimizing their energy use (e.g., whether to hunt, take refuge, socialize for reproductive purposes or not, and rest) (Heithaus et al., 2001;Papastamatiou et al., 2011). This will lead to specific patterns of activity depending on the physical conditions (tides, time of day, temperature, wind, vegetation, currents, bathymetry, etc.) and external biological conditions (distribution and density of their predators and prey), as well as physiological requirements, at a given time (Houston & McNamara, 2014). In general terms, the more linear movements (and fewer

Social dynamics and individual hunting tactics of white sharks revealed by biologging

“…White sharks at a South African seal colony are more likely to perform ARS behaviour early in the morning as conditions at sunrise are optimal for ambushing prey on the surface [12,15]. At GI, ARS is highest during the day (although for short periods of time), potentially partially induced by baited cage diving [12,30]. While white sharks form lots of likely random associations with other individuals, they also form longer (up to 70 min) associations with certain sharks.…”

Hidden Markov models: Pitfalls and opportunities in ecology

“…behavioural state each hour and within that behavioural substate each second). They are already successfully applied in ecology, for example, to the dive behaviour of harbour porpoises (Leos-Barajas et al, 2017;Sacchi & Swallow, 2021), to horizontal and vertical movements of Atlantic cod (Adam et al, 2019) and white sharks (Aquino-Baleytó et al, 2021), and to the kinematic movements of northern resident killer whales (Sidrow et al, 2021).…”