![]() ![]() ![]() Flexible foraging techniques represent an important key to survival inside the highly productive but heterogeneous Benguela upwelling ecosystem. Diet was mainly Cape Anchovy Engraulis encrasicolis, suggesting that birds probably displayed two contrasted strategies for capturing the same prey. ![]() This shows that only the concomitant use of tracking and depth tags can adequately classify diving strategies in a diver like the Cape Cormorant. Dive shape was linked to dive category in only 60% of dives, while the descent rate, ascent rate and bottom duration/dive duration ratio of a dive best explained its dive category. Benthic dives were deeper, occurring on seafloors mainly 10–30 m deep. Pelagic dives were shallow (mean: 5 m) and took place over seafloors 5–100 m deep. Pelagic dives occurred almost as frequently as benthic dives. In all, dive category was assigned to all dives performed by 29 birds. Results were obtained by simultaneously deploying small, high resolution and high sampling frequency GPS and time-depth loggers on birds breeding on islands off Western South Africa (34S, 18>) in 2008. Here, we report the diving behaviour of a flying diving seabird, the Cape Cormorant Phalacrocorax capensis, weighing 1.0–1.4 kg. However, information is still lacking for the smaller-bodied species, due mostly to size constraints of data-loggers. Knowledge on how divers exploit the water column vertically in relation to water depth is crucial to our understanding of their ecology and to their subsequent conservation. ![]()
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