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55 results for “Elephant Seals”
Sealing. Oval sealing in terracotta with a trident, vase and elephant goad in an oval cartouche.
<p>Sealing. Oval sealing in terracotta with a trident, vase and elephant goad in an oval cartouche. British Museum 2005,0814.23.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p>
Diving behaviors of juvenile northern and southern elephant seals
<p><span></span>Understanding the ontogeny of diving behavior in marine megafauna is crucial due to its influence on foraging success, energy budgets, and mortality. We compared the ontogeny of diving behavior in two closely related species – northern elephant seals (<em>Mirounga angustirostris</em>, n = 4) and southern elephant seals (<em>Mirounga leonina</em>, n = 9) – to shed light on the ecological and evolutionary processes underlying migration. Although both species have similar sizes and behaviors as adults, we discovered that juvenile northern elephant seals have superior diving development, reaching 260 meters diving depth in just 30 days, while southern elephant seals require 160 days. Similarly, northern elephant seals achieve dive durations of ~11 minutes on their first day of migration, while southern elephant seals take 125 days. The faster physiological maturation of northern elephant seals could be related to longer offspring dependency and post-weaning fast durations, allowing them to develop their endogenous oxygen stores. Comparison across both species suggests that weaned seal pups face a trade-off between leaving early with higher energy stores but poorer physiological abilities or leaving later with improved physiology but reduced fat stores. This trade-off might be influenced by their evolutionary history, which shapes their migration behaviors in changing environments over time.</p>
Data from: Hypoxia blunts angiogenic signaling and upregulates the antioxidant system in elephant seal endothelial cells
<p><strong><em>Background</em></strong></p> <p>Elephant seals exhibit extreme hypoxemic tolerance derived from repetitive hypoxia/reoxygenation episodes they experience during diving bouts. Real-time assessment of the molecular changes underlying protection against hypoxic injury in seals remains restricted by their at-sea inaccessibility. Hence, we developed a proliferative arterial endothelial cell culture model from elephant seals and used RNA-seq, functional assays, and confocal microscopy to assess the molecular response to prolonged hypoxia.</p> <p><strong><em>Results</em></strong></p> <p>Seal and human endothelial cells exposed to 1% O<sub>2</sub> for up to 6 h respond differently to acute and prolonged hypoxia. Seal cells decouple stabilization of the hypoxia-sensitive transcriptional regulator HIF-1α from angiogenic signaling. Rapid upregulation of genes involved in glutathione (GSH) metabolism supports the maintenance of GSH pools, and intracellular succinate increases in seal but not human cells. High maximal and spare respiratory capacity in seal cells after hypoxia exposure occurs in concert with increasing mitochondrial branch length and independent from major changes in extracellular acidification rate, suggesting that seal cells recover oxidative metabolism without significant glycolytic dependency after hypoxia exposure.</p> <p><strong><em>Conclusions</em></strong></p> <p>We found that the glutathione antioxidant system is upregulated in seal cells during hypoxia, while this system remains static in comparable human cells. Furthermore, we found that in contrast to human cells, hypoxia exposure rapidly activates HIF-1 in seal cells, but this response is decoupled from the canonical HIF-angiogenesis pathway. These results highlight the unique mechanisms that confer extraordinary tolerance to limited oxygen availability in a champion diving mammal.</p>
Data from: Hypoxia blunts angiogenic signaling and upregulates the antioxidant system in elephant seal endothelial cells
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Age and reproduction in Northern Elephant Seals
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Diving behaviors of juvenile northern and southern elephant seals
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Northern elephant seal tracking and diving – raw and curated data
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Northern elephant seal tracking and diving – processed data
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Foraging strategies and lifetime fitness in northern elephant seals
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Data From: Effects of disease on foraging behaviour and success in an individual free-ranging northern elephant seal
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Sealing. Circular sealing in terracotta with a three line inscription; above a discus. On the reverse a hooked device, possibly an elephant goad
<p>Sealing. Circular sealing in terracotta with a three line inscription; above a discus. On the reverse a hooked device, possibly an elephant goad. British Museum 2005,0814.10.</p>
Data from: Trade-offs between age-related breeding improvement and survival senescence in highly polygynous elephant seals: dominant males always do better
<ol> <li>Life history trade-off theory predicts that current reproduction can negatively affect survival and future reproduction. Few studies have assessed breeding costs for males of polygynous species compared to females, despite substantial variation in breeding success among individual males (e.g. subordinate <i>cf</i>. dominant breeders). Specifically, differentiating between the cost of attending breeding seasons, and the additional cost of successfully securing and mating females is lacking.</li> <li>We investigated whether trade-offs are present in the highly polygynous male southern elephant seal (<i>Mirounga leonina</i>) using 34-years of individual-level data. We compare age-specific survival, recruitment and future breeding success probabilities of pre-breeders (males yet to recruit) and breeders (subordinate and dominant social ranks) using multievent models.</li> <li>Pre-breeders and breeders of overlapping ages had similar survival probabilities, suggesting that there was no attendance cost for early recruits. In addition, the probability of recruiting as a dominant breeder never exceeded recruitment probability as a subordinate breeder of the same age. Therefore, older pre-breeders that delayed attendance costs generally did not improve their breeding success (probability of being dominant) at recruitment more than younger recruits. Rather, recruitment age may be a function of individual quality, with lower quality individuals requiring more time to socially mature.</li> <li>When comparing subordinate and dominant breeders, we found clear evidence for survival senescence, with subordinate breeders having a higher baseline mortality. In contrast, age-specific future breeding success (probability of being dominant at <i>t</i>+1) increased with age, with dominant breeders maintaining higher subsequent breeding success than subordinate breeders.</li> <li>The opposite trends in survival and future breeding success for both subordinate and dominant breeders may indicate a lifetime, population-level trade-off. However, we found no evidence to suggest that being a dominant breeder consecutively (and having a higher accumulated breeding cost) accelerated the rate of senescence when compared to individuals that were previously subordinate.</li> <li>Thus, males experienced actuarial senescence regardless of social rank, with dominant (and possibly high quality) breeders showing a reduced trade-off between survival and future breeding success. We make several novel contributions to understanding polygynous male life histories and southern elephant seal demography.</li> </ol>
Early sexual dimorphism in the developing gut microbiome of northern elephant seals
<p>The gut microbiome is an integral part of a species' ecology, but we know little about how host characteristics impact its development in wild populations. Here, we explored the role of such intrinsic factors in shaping the gut microbiome of northern elephant seals during a critical developmental window of six weeks after weaning, when the pups stay ashore without feeding. We found substantial sex-differences in the early-life gut microbiome, even though males and females could not yet be distinguished morphologically. Sex and age both explained around 15% of the variation in gut microbial beta diversity, while microbial communities sampled from the same individual showed high levels of similarity across time, explaining another 40% of the variation. Only a small proportion of the variation in beta diversity was explained by health status, assessed by full blood counts, but clinically healthy individuals had a greater microbial alpha diversity than their clinically abnormal peers. Across the post-weaning period, the northern elephant seal gut microbiome was highly dynamic. We found evidence for several colonisation and extinction events as well as a decline in <i>Bacteroides </i>and an increase in <i>Prevotella</i>, a pattern that has previously been associated with the transition from nursing to solid food. Lastly, we show that genetic relatedness was correlated with gut microbiome similarity in males but not females, again reflecting early sex-differences. Our study represents a naturally diet-controlled and longitudinal investigation of how intrinsic factors shape the early gut microbiome in a species with extreme sex differences in morphology and life history.</p>
Macquarie Island southern elephant seal capture-mark-recapture data
<p>The Southern Ocean has been disproportionately affected by climate change and is therefore an ideal place to study the influence of changing environmental conditions on ecosystems. Changes in the demography of predator populations are indicators of broader shifts in food-web structure, but long-term data are required to study these effects. Southern elephant seals (<em>Mirounga leonina</em>) from Macquarie Island have consistently decreased in population size while all other major populations across the Southern Ocean have recently stabilised or are increasing. Two long-term mark-recapture studies (1956-1967 and 1993-2009) have monitored this population, which provides an opportunity to investigate demographic performance over a range of climatic conditions. This provides insights on individual vital rates of known-age seals from Macquarie Island over extensively long timeseries.</p>
Data from: Where are the beachmasters? Unexpectedly weak polygyny among southern elephant seals on a South Shetland Island
<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p> <p>Intraspecific variation in animal mating systems can have important implications for ecological, evolutionary and demographic processes in wild populations. For example, patterns of mating can impact social structure, dispersal, effective population size and inbreeding. However, few species have been studied in sufficient detail to elucidate mating system plasticity and its dependence on ecological and demographic factors. Southern elephant seals (Mirounga leonina) have long been regarded as a textbook example of a polygynous mating system, with dominant ‘beachmaster’ males controlling harems of up to several hundred females. However, behavioural and genetic studies have uncovered appreciable geographic variation in the strength of polygyny among elephant seal populations. We therefore used molecular parentage analysis to investigate patterns of parentage in a small satellite colony of elephant seals at the South Shetland Islands. We hypothesised that dominant males would be able to successfully monopolise the relatively small numbers of females present in the colony, leading to relatively high levels of polygyny. A total of 424 individuals (comprising 33 adult males, 101 adult females and 290 pups) sampled over eight years were genotyped at 20 microsatellites and reproductive success was analysed by genetically assigning parents. Paternity could only be assigned to 31 pups (10.7%), despite our panel of genetic markers being highly informative and the genotyping error rate being very low. The strength of inferred polygyny was weak in comparison to previous genetic studies of the same species, with the most successful male fathering only seven pups over the entire course of the study. Our results show that, even in a species long regarded as a model for extreme polygyny, male reproductive skew can vary substantially among populations.</p>
Sexual dimorphism of head, teeth, flipper, and body size in northern elephant seals (<em>Mirounga angustirostris</em>) throughout ontogeny
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Data from: Molecular population genetics of the northern elephant seal Mirounga angustirostris
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Data from: Trade-offs between age-related breeding improvement and survival senescence in highly polygynous elephant seals: dominant males always do better
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Data from: Sex, body size, and boldness shape the seasonal foraging habitat selection in southern elephant seals
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Early sexual dimorphism in the developing gut microbiome of northern elephant seals
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