Abstract: The ability of marine mammals to accumulate sufficient lipid energy reserves is vital for mammals' survival and successful reproduction. However, long-term monitoring of at-sea changes in body condition, specifically lipid stores, has only been possible in elephant seals performing prolonged drift dives (low-density lipids alter the rates of depth change while drifting). This approach has limited applicability to other species. Using hydrodynamic performance analysis during transit glides, we developed and validated a novel satellite-linked data logger that calculates real-time changes in body density (?lipid stores). As gliding is ubiquitous amongst divers, the system can assess body condition in a broad array of diving animals. The tag processes high sampling rate depth and three-axis acceleration data to identify 5 s high pitch angle glide segments at depths >100 m. Body density is estimated for each glide using gliding speed and pitch to quantify drag versus buoyancy forces acting on the gliding animal. We used tag data from 24 elephant seals (Mirounga spp.) to validate the onboard calculation of body density relative to drift rate. The new tags relayed body density estimates over 200 days and documented lipid store accumulation during migration with good correspondence between changes in body density and drift rate. Our study provided updated drag coefficient values for gliding (Cd,f = 0.03) and drifting (Cd,s = 0.12) elephant seals, both substantially lower than previous estimates. We also demonstrated post-hoc estimation of the gliding drag coefficient and body density using transmitted data, which is especially useful when drag parameters cannot be estimated with sufficient accuracy before tag deployment. Our method has the potential to advance the field of marine biology by switching the research paradigm from indirectly inferring animal body condition from foraging effort to directly measuring changes in body condition relative to foraging effort, habitat, ecological factors and anthropogenic stressors in the changing oceans. Expanding the method to account for diving air volumes will expand the system's applicability to shallower-diving (<100 m) species, facilitating real-time monitoring of body condition in a broad range of breath-hold divers.

Abstract: The Arctic is warming nearly four times as rapidly as other regions of the planet, challenging the capacity of organisms to cope with shifting resources and maintain thermal balance. Tracking responses of free-living animals in dynamic environments can be challenging, but is increasingly enabled by advanced biologging approaches. We used data gathered from miniaturized bird-borne devices to demonstrate increases in energy expenditure with declining sea ice conditions and warming sea surface temperatures in a dove-sized seabird, the little auk (also named dovekie; Alle alle). This keystone species feeds on sea ice-associated copepods and inhabits large breeding colonies in the High Arctic.

Abstract: The TICON (TIdal CONstants) dataset contains harmonic constants of 40 tidal constituents computed for 1,145 tide gauges distributed globally. The tidal estimations are based on publicly available sea level records of the second version of the Global Extreme Sea Level Analysis (GESLA) project and were derived through a least squares-based harmonic analysis on the single time series. A preliminary screening was performed on all records to exclude doubtful observations. Only the records containing more than 70% of valid measurements were processed, that correspond to 89.7% of the total 1,276 original public GESLA records. The results are stored in a text file, and include additional information on the position of the stations, the starting and ending years of the analysed record, the estimated error of the fit, a code that corresponds to the source of the record and additional information on the single time series. In ocean tide models, data from in situ stations are used for validation purposes, and TICON is a useful and easy-to-handle data set that allows the users to select the records according to different criteria most suitable for their purposes. The data are provided with DOI identification in the PANGAEA repository.