Abstract: The timing of events in the early part of the breeding season is crucially important for successful reproduction. Long-lived animals that migrate large distances independently of each other meet at the breeding sites to re-establish their pair bonds and coordinate their breeding duties with their partners.

Abstract: Biparental care is widespread in avian species. Individuals may match the contribution of their partner, resulting in equal parental effort, or may exploit their partner, to minimise their own investment. These two hypotheses have received much theoretical and empirical attention in short-lived species, that change mates between seasons. However, in species with persistent pair bonds, where divorce is rare and costly, selective pressures are different, as partners share the value of future reproduction. In such species, coordination has been suggested to be adaptive and to increase early in life, as a consequence of the importance of mate familiarity. However, as birds age, an increase in re-pairing probability occurs in parallel to a decline in their survival probability. At the point when partners no longer share future reproductive success, exploitation of a partner could become adaptive, reducing selection for coordinated effort. As such, we suggest that coordination in parental effort will decline with age in long-lived species. Using incubation bout duration data, estimated from salt-water immersion bio-loggers, deployed on black-browed albatrosses Thalassarche melanophris, we examined the correlation in incubation bout durations for sequential bouts, as a measure of coordination. Our results show that coordination is highest in inexperienced pairs (early in reproductive life) and declines throughout the lifetime of birds. This suggests that both cooperation, indicated by coordinated effort, and conflict over care occurs in this species. We find no change in individual bout duration with increasing breeding experience, and hence no support for the hypothesis that aging leads to changes in individual incubation behaviour. This is, to our knowledge, the first study to demonstrate strong coordination in parental care when pairs share future reproductive success, but a decline in coordination with age, as sexual conflict increases.

Abstract: This review presents an innovative approach to investigate the teuthofauna from the Southern Ocean by combining two complementary data sets, the literature on cephalopod taxonomy and biogeography, together with predator dietary investigations. Sixty squids were recorded south of the Subtropical Front, including one circumpolar Antarctic (Psychroteuthis glacialis Thiele, 1920), 13 circumpolar Southern Ocean, 20 circumpolar subantarctic, eight regional subantarctic, and 12 occasional subantarctic species. A critical evaluation removed five species from the list, and one species has an unknown taxonomic status. The 42 Southern Ocean squids belong to three large taxonomic units, bathyteuthoids (n?=?1 species), myopsids (n?=?1), and oegopsids (n?=?40). A high level of endemism (21 species, 50%, all oegopsids) characterizes the Southern Ocean teuthofauna. Seventeen families of oegopsids are represented, with three dominating families, onychoteuthids (seven species, five endemics), ommastrephids (six species, three endemics), and cranchiids (five species, three endemics). Recent improvements in beak identification and taxonomy allowed making new correspondence between beak and species names, such as Galiteuthis suhmi (Hoyle 1886), Liguriella podophtalma Issel, 1908, and the recently described Taonius notalia Evans, in prep. Gonatus phoebetriae beaks were synonymized with those of Gonatopsis octopedatus Sasaki, 1920, thus increasing significantly the number of records and detailing the circumpolar distribution of this rarely caught Southern Ocean squid. The review extends considerably the number of species, including endemics, recorded from the Southern Ocean, but it also highlights that the corresponding species to two well-described beaks (Moroteuthopsis sp. B and Psychroteuthis sp. B) are still unknown.