Understanding and managing the response of marine ecosystems to human pressures including climate change requires reliable large-scale and multi-decadal information on the state of key populations. These populations include the pelagic animals that support ecosystem services including carbon export and fisheries. The use of research vessels to collect information using scientific nets and acoustics is being replaced with techn...

With environmental change, understanding how species recover from overharvesting and maintain viable populations is central to ecosystem restoration. Here, we reconstruct 90 years of recovery trajectory of the Antarctic fur seal at South Georgia (S.W. Atlantic), a key indicator species in the krill‐based food webs of the Southern Ocean. After being harvested to commercial extinction by 1907, this population rebounded and now c...

Despite the ecological importance of leopard seals ( Hydrurga leptonyx ) as apex marine predators, little is known about their reproductive biology. To address this paucity, we reviewed leopard seal birth and pup records and applied a standardised age-class classification system to differentiate between births/newborns (offspring ≤ 14 days old) and pups (> 14 days but < 6 months old). We compiled 19 birth/newborn and 141 pup r...

Despite an increasing appreciation of the importance of host–microbe interactions in ecological and evolutionary processes, the factors shaping microbial communities in wild populations remain poorly understood. We therefore exploited a natural experiment provided by two adjacent Antarctic fur seal ( Arctocephalus gazella ) colonies of high and low social density and combined 16S rRNA metabarcoding with microsatellite profilin...

A major challenge in ecology is to understand the impact of increased environmental variability on populations and ecosystems. To maximize their fitness in a variable environment, life history theory states that individuals should favor a bet‐hedging strategy, involving a reduction of annual breeding performance and an increase in adult survival so that reproduction can be attempted over more years. As a result, evolution towa...

Penguins are adapted to live in extreme environments, but they can be highly sensitive to climate change, which disrupts penguin life history strategies when it alters the weather, oceanography and critical habitats. For example, in the southwest Atlantic, the distributional range of the ice‐obligate emperor and Adélie penguins has shifted poleward and contracted, while the ice‐intolerant gentoo and chinstrap penguins have exp...

The consequences of warming for Antarctic long‐lived organisms depend on their ability to survive changing patterns of climate and environmental variation. Among birds and mammals of different Antarctic regions, including emperor penguins, snow petrels, southern fulmars, Antarctic fur seals and Weddell seals, we found strong support for selection of life history traits that reduce interannual variation in fitness. These specie...

Climate warming and associated sea ice reductions in Antarctica have modified habitat conditions for some species. These include the congeneric Adélie, chinstrap and gentoo penguins, which now demonstrate remarkable population responses to regional warming. However, inconsistencies in the direction of population changes between species at different study sites complicate the understanding of causal processes. Here, we show tha...

A bstract The use of photo‐identification and its reliability in capture‐recapture studies of Mediterranean monk seals were assessed using slides collected in the colony at Cap Blanc, western Sahara, from 1993 to 1996. Five tests indicated that researchers involved in photo‐identification were proficient in matching slides of identified seals, consistent in classifying the side of the seal shown in slides and in assigning the...