Raking the ocean surface : new patterns of coordinated motion in seabirds

Coordinated movements of seabirds exploiting a prey patch are known to increase prey encounter and capture rates of individuals. These behaviours, based on effective cooperation between seabirds, have only been reported at small scale, i.e. the scale of the prey patch. However, the efficient prey exploitation by seabirds in vast oceans require larger scale processes such as information transfers between individuals. Indeed, information transfers between foraging seabirds (e.g. changes in behaviour) reduce their search cost while increasing their prey encounter rate. Whether or not these information transfer processes imply active cooperation is unknown. Using images from fishing boat radars in the eastern tropical Atlantic, we show the existence of frequent medium-scale patterns of coordinated flights of seabird groups, consisting in seabird fronts ("rake" patterns) of 0.3 to 4.4 km width, displacing cohesively over 1.2 to 10.6 km and lasting between 2 and 19 min. For these rakes to be maintained, seabird groups have to adjust their flight speeds and directions, while they are on average distant of 500 m from each other, what cannot occur by chance. These findings suggest the existence of collective and coordinated movements in seabirds during prey searching at several kilometres' scale. This potential cooperation between foraging seabird groups brings new insight in the evolutionary trajectories of seabirds life-style.This dataset contains two types of files : - in .zip files : anonymized radar images (all recorded during year 2016) that were used in this study. Time of recording is included in the file name, and images are classified in monthly repertories. FORMAT : .png ex : Image_April_151649.png corresponds to an image recorded in April 2016 at 15:16:49 . - wind components, wind directions, wind speed, sun azimut and elevation, relative to the time and location (latitude and longitude, centered on [0 , 0]) of radar image recordings. FORMAT : .mat ex : DataFile_2016_April.mat corresponds to metadata (wind and sun complementary data, anonymized location) relative to each radar image recorded in April 2016