Demographic rates of northern royal albatross at Taiaroa Head, New Zealand.

Demographic rates, such as annual survival rate, are generally difficult to estimate for long-lived seabirds, because of the length of time required for this kind of study and the remoteness of colonies. However, a small colony of northern royal albatross (Diomedea sanfordi) established itself on the mainland of New Zealand at Taiaroa Head, making possible regular banding and monitoring of its individuals since the first chick fledged, in 1938. Data on the presence/absence of birds, as well as on breeding outcomes, were available for the period from 1989-90 to 2011-12, and included 2128 annual resightings of 355 banded individuals of known age. The main goal of the present study was to estimate the annual survival rate of juveniles, pre-breeders, and adults at Taiaroa Head. These rates were estimated simultaneously in a single Bayesian multi-state capture-recapture model. Several models were fitted to the data, with different levels of complexity. From the most parsimonious model, the overall annual adult survival rate was estimated as 0.950 (95% CI [0.941-0.959]). In this model, adult survival declined with age, from 0.976 (95% CI [0.963-0.988]) at 6 years, the minimum age at first breeding, to 0.915 (95% CI [0.879-0.946]) at 40 years. Mean annual survival of pre-breeders was 0.966 (95% CI [0.950-0.980]), and 0.933 (95% CI [0.908-0.966]) for juveniles. There was no discernible difference in survival between males and females, and there was no apparent trend in survival over time. Estimates of other demographic rates were also obtained during the estimation process. The mean age at first return of juveniles to the colony was estimated as 4.8 years (95% CI [4.6-5.1]), and the mean age at first breeding as 8.9 years (95% CI [8.5-9.3]). Because all the birds of the colony were banded, it was possible to estimate the total population size. The number of northern royal albatross present annually at the Taiaroa Head colony has doubled since 1989-90, and the current total population size was estimated to be over 200 individuals. The ratio of the total population size to the number of annual breeding pairs varied from 5 to 12 among years, with an overall mean of 7.65 (95% CI [7.56-7.78]), and this high variability highlights the need for a sufficient number of surveys of seabird breeding populations before reliable conclusions on population trends can be made. Although long-term data allowed estimates of demographic rates of northern royal albatross at Taiaroa Head, the location of the colony and the ongoing management by staff mean that the population dynamics may differ from those of the main population on the Chatham Islands.

Common dolphin (Delphinus delphis) bycatch in New Zealand commercial trawl fisheries.

Marine mammals are regularly reported as bycatch in commercial and artisanal fisheries, but data are often insufficient to allow assessment of these incidental mortalities. Observer coverage of the mackerel trawl fishery in New Zealand waters between 1995 and 2011 allowed evaluation of common dolphin Delphinus delphis bycatch on the North Island west coast, where this species is the most frequently caught cetacean. Observer data were used to develop a statistical model to estimate total captures and explore covariates related to captures. A two-stage Bayesian hurdle model was used, with a logistic generalised linear model predicting whether any common dolphin captures occurred on a given tow of the net, and a zero-truncated Poisson distribution to estimate the number of dolphin captures, given that there was a capture event. Over the 16-year study period, there were 119 common dolphin captures reported on 4299 observed tows. Capture events frequently involved more than one individual, with a maximum of nine common dolphin observed caught in a single tow. There was a peak of 141 estimated common dolphin captures (95% c.i.: 56 to 276; 6.27 captures per 100 tows) in 2002-03, following the marked expansion in annual effort in this fishery to over 2000 tows. Subsequently, the number of captures fluctuated although fishing effort remained relatively high. Of the observed capture events, 60% were during trawls where the top of the net (headline) was <40 m below the surface, and the model determined that this covariate best explained common dolphin captures. Increasing headline depth by 21 m would halve the probability of a dolphin capture event on a tow. While lack of abundance data prevents assessment of the impact of these mortalities on the local common dolphin population, a clear recommendation from this study is the increasing of headline depth to reduce common dolphin captures.

Adaptation and enslavement in endosymbiont-host associations.

The evolutionary persistence of symbiotic associations is a puzzle. Adaptation should eliminate cooperative traits if it is possible to enjoy the advantages of cooperation without reciprocating-a facet of cooperation known in game theory as the Prisoner's Dilemma. Despite this barrier, symbioses are widespread and may have been necessary for the evolution of complex life. The discovery of strategies such as tit-for-tat has been presented as a general solution to the problem of cooperation. However, this only holds for within-species cooperation, where a single strategy will come to dominate the population. In a symbiotic association each species may have a different strategy, and the theoretical analysis of the single-species problem is no guide to the outcome. We present basic analysis of two-species cooperation and show that a species with a fast adaptation rate is enslaved by a slowly evolving one. Paradoxically, the rapidly evolving species becomes highly cooperative, whereas the slowly evolving one gives little in return. This helps understand the occurrence of endosymbioses where the host benefits, but the symbionts appear to gain little from the association.

Chaotic stirring by a mesoscale surface-ocean flow.

The horizontal stirring properties of the flow in a region of the East Australian Current are calculated. A surface velocity field derived from remotely sensed data, using the maximum cross correlation method, is integrated to derive the distribution of the finite-time Lyapunov exponents. For the region studied (between latitudes 36 degrees S and 41 degrees S and longitudes 150 degrees E and 156 degrees E) the mean Lyapunov exponent during 1997 is estimated to be lambda( infinity )=4x10(-7) s(-1). This is in close agreement with the few other measurements of stirring rates in the surface ocean which are available. Recent theoretical results on the multifractal spectra of advected reactive tracers are applied to an analysis of a sea-surface temperature image of the study region. The spatial pattern seen in the image compares well with the pattern seen in an advected tracer with a first-order response to changes in surface forcing. The response timescale is estimated to be 20 days. (c) 2002 American Institute of Physics.