United States

Welcome Seabirders!  

Welcome to Virtual World Seabird Conference 3 - vWSC3! Whether you are in your office or lab, at home, in a coffee shop or bar poaching some wifi, or at a remote field site or research vessel – we are very excited to welcome you to the third ever World Seabird Conference. 

We would like to thank ALL of you for being so patient as WSC3 was scheduled, postponed, rescheduled, revised to virtual, and scheduled again. Throughout all those iterations there was one message that remained perfectly clear – seabirders were eager to meet and share their science. If we could not meet in person then virtual it would have to be, but a 3rd WSC was something everyone wanted. That support and commitment helped the WSU Board of Directors and Member Societies sort through all of the challenges they faced to plan and hold this conference. 

The list of those that need to be thanked is long and, while we plan on recognizing many during the live closing plenary, it is important to do so here in writing as well. 

The Australasian Seabird Group was our Local Host for our plan to meet in Hobart, Tasmania. They invested substantial time and effort to find venues and plan events that we unfortunately were not able to visit. Nonetheless we appreciate their work on behalf of WSC3 and encourage all of you to thank them when you see their members in Gathertown or elsewhere during our virtual meeting. Their willingness to host created the initial excitement for WSC3 and without that our vWSC would not have been possible.

We also wish to thank the Science Program Committee, the Virtual Committee, and the Early Career Scientist Committee for their hard work planning the logistics, events, and schedule for vWSC3. These committees also had to deal with changing parameters and short timelines that made what is always a challenging task even more challenging. The Travel Awards Committee also invested time and effort in developing procedures for awarding travel funds that ultimately would not be implemented. 

Our ability to shift from an in-person to a virtual meeting, and to do so in a way that would be financially feasible, was due to the effective efforts of The International Fundraising Committee and to our financial sponsors. The IFC raised funds to support WSC3 and then, through the good relationships they built with sponsors, ensured we could re-envision how those funds could be used to support a virtual conference that would be affordable and high-quality.

We all owe the WSU Board of Directors and the Representatives of the Member Societies a great deal of thanks. They are the ones who manage the WSU and, for the past 18 months, have had to have a series of challenging meetings and conversations, have had to make a series of difficult choices, have had to do all of that while considering the short- and long-term health of WSU and the World Seabird Conferences, and did this while also managing their own challenges at their day jobs. We are grateful for their diligence, patience, foresight, and throughout all of the meetings, their collegiality. Also – a 6-year term is quite a commitment!

There would not be a WSC3 without a successful WSC1 and WSC2. Thanks go to the Pacific Seabird Group for their support of WSC1 in Victoria, Canada, and to the African Seabird Group for their support of WSC2 in Cape Town, South Africa. In each of these endeavors and for our current conference we were fortunate to work with a dependable and trustworthy partner in Podium Conferences. Michelle Smith and Marischal de Armond have become valued members of our team and have not only helped us plan conferences but have assisted and advised the WSU Chairs and Board on issues above and beyond conference planning. 

As we embark on our vWSC3 week we extend to all of you our thanks for showing up, for being patient, and most importantly for the work you do with seabirds. We are all part of a unique, global community that shares an interest, a fascination, and a passion for birds that make a living in our world’s oceans. We have advanced the science, conservation, and management of seabirds as well the ecosystems they inhabit. We are consistently impressed and motivated by the work you do. 

The WSU formed in 2010 because we saw the need for a global organization to address challenges at a global level. Over the past 11 years WSU has grown, adapted, and evolved to become the community that this week is making vWSC3 a reality. Enjoy the week, appreciate and support the friends and colleagues you have made in the community, and if you see us in a virtual hallway please stop and say hello! 

Thank you for the opportunity to serve all of you and the WSU over the past few years,

Nicholas Carlile, Interim Chair, WSU<br>
Patrick Jodice, 2nd Chair of the WSU<br><br>

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3rd World Seabird Conference

Join us for four days of science, networking and virtual engagement with delegates from around the world!

**Abstract:**

Fluctuation in food availability is a frequently-encountered environmental challenge for seabirds, and secretion of glucocorticoid hormones (corticosterone) is one of the best-studied physiological mediators of the response to food shortages. Elevated corticosterone is assumed to yield short-term benefits for adults and chicks, yet potentially evoke long-term costs. A unique field station in Alaska permits manipulation of food availability and/or corticosterone in free-living black-legged kittiwake adults and chicks (Rissa tridactyla) to test assumptions about causes and consequences of interindividual variation in glucocorticoid secretion. In breeding known-age adults, we found that a reduction in local food availability (induced by experimentally withdrawing food supplementation) evoked an increase in baseline corticosterone; this increase was lower in birds who spent more time off the colony, presumably foraging. Additionally, much of the inter-individual variation in corticosterone release was explained by telomere length, which may reflect individual quality. An accumulating literature (mostly from captivity) demonstrates potentially costly "programming" effects of developmental exposure to glucocorticoids on phenotype, including telomere length, while benefits of elevated glucocorticoids are rarely tested. In chicks, we found strong correlational, but weaker experimental, support for the common assumption that elevation of glucocorticoids rapidly mobilizes energy - food supplementation reduced circulating corticosterone, glucose and ketones but acute corticosterone administration did not mobilize energy substrates (though catecholamines likely did). In contrast, repeated, acute glucocorticoid elevations induced persistent downregulation of immune genes in chicks. Thus, there is currently stronger evidence for the costs of glucocorticoids than for the benefits, particularly in chicks. In long-lived, late-recruiting species like seabirds, it is challenging to connect long term fitness to non-lethal environmental challenges experienced by chicks. However, our results indicate that monitoring glucocorticoid exposure in seabird chicks may provide valuable insight into the fitness of future cohorts.

**Authors:**

Z Morgan Benowitz-Fredericks¹, Scott Hatch², Alexander Kitaysky³

¹Bucknell University, ²Institute for Seabird Research and Conservation, ³University of Alaska Fairbanks

Causes and consequences of interindividual variation in glucocorticoid secretion: Experiments in free-living kittiwakes

symposium

Contaminants of growing concern: Poly- and Perfluoroalkylated Substances (PFAS) and their physiological consequences in seabirds

Resource allocation of a deep-diving Arctic seabird, the thick-billed murre (Uria lomvia), in response to sea-ice variation during the chick-rearing period

Across borders: External factors and prior behavior influence North Pacific albatross associations with fishing vessels

Identifying seabird interactions with fisheries from GPS tracks: Automatic classification validated using bird-borne video recordings

Coupling bird-borne radar detectors and AIS data to assess seabird-fisheries interactions

Seabird-fishery interactions revealed by bird-borne GPS and camera loggers

Assessing the limitations of conventional predator control in Maui Nui: Re-envisioning the approach to protecting a unique seabird habitat

How do gulls interact with offshore wind farms? Assessing avoidance and behaviour of lesser black-backed gulls using GPS telemetry and accelerometry

WSC3 Poster Sessions Info

Into the unknown - tracking tākoketai/black petrel fledglings across the Pacific.

technical paper

poster

https://d3smihljt9218e.cloudfront.net/transcript/22581/subtitle/68dd1aac6c7061e73a7968cc41acdbcf.vtt

English

Causes and consequences of interindividual variation in glucocorticoid secretion: Experiments in free-living kittiwakes

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