ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2012
Environmental extremes versus ecological extremes: impact of a massive iceberg on the population dynamics of a high-level Antarctic marine predator.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Lucky To Be Alive, Luckier to Breed: Lifetime Reproduction in Weddell Seals.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Research Bias in Long-Term Monitoring of Antarctic Nearshore Marine and Terrestrial Biota.Global change biology · 2025Review
- Seasonal resource pulses and the foraging depth of a Southern Ocean top predator.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Sources of variation in maternal allocation in a long-lived mammal.The Journal of animal ecology · 2020Article
- Antarctic petrels 'on the ice rocks': wintering strategy of an Antarctic seabird.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Reproductive success delays moult phenology in a polar mammal.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Temporal changes in Weddell seal dive behavior over winter: Are females increasing foraging effort to support gestation?Ecology and evolution · 2018Article
- Learning from single extreme events.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Review
- Contrasting behavior between two populations of an ice-obligate predator in East Antarctica.Ecology and evolution · 2017Article
- Birth dates vary with fixed and dynamic maternal features, offspring sex, and extreme climatic events in a high-latitude marine mammal.Ecology and evolution · 2016Article
- Contrasting responses to a climate regime change by sympatric, ice-dependent predators.BMC evolutionary biology · 2016Article
- Tight coupling of primary production and marine mammal reproduction in the Southern Ocean.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2015Article
- Use of posterior predictive checks as an inferential tool for investigating individual heterogeneity in animal population vital rates.Ecology and evolution · 2014Article
- Antarctic climate change: extreme events disrupt plastic phenotypic response in Adélie penguins.PloS one · 2014Article
- No evidence of the effect of extreme weather events on annual occurrence of four groups of ectothermic species.PloS one · 2014Article
- Individual heterogeneity in reproductive rates and cost of reproduction in a long-lived vertebrate.Ecology and evolution · 2013Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Extreme events have been suggested to play a disproportionate role in shaping ecological processes, but our understanding of the types of environmental conditions that elicit extreme consequences in natural ecosystems is limited. Here, we investigated the impact of a massive iceberg on the dynamics of a population of Weddell seals. Reproductive rates of females were reduced, but survival appeared unaffected. We also found suggestive evidence for a prolonged shift towards higher variability in reproductive rates. The annual number of females attending colonies showed unusual swings during the iceberg period, a pattern that was apparently the consequence of changes in sea-ice conditions. In contrast to the dramatic effects that were recorded in nearby populations of emperor penguins, our results suggest that this unusual environmental event did not have an extreme impact on the population of seals in the short-term, as they managed to avoid survival costs and were able to rapidly re-achieve high levels of reproduction by the end of the perturbation. Nevertheless, population projections suggest that even this modest impact on reproductive rates could negatively affect the population in the long run if such events were to occur more frequently, as is predicted by models of climate change.
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