Beyond dive shape: the identification of fine-scale vertical movements reveal within-dive behavioural structure in a pursuit-diving seabird

Understanding how diving predators exploit prey in dynamic marine environments provides insight into their foraging strategies, energetic trade-offs, and capacity to adapt to changing conditions. While traditional classifications of dive shape have provided valuable albeit coarse insights, fine-scale behaviours embedded within dives, such as prey encounter/capture attempts, can be overlooked. We used time-depth recorders (TDR) deployed on Atlantic puffins (Fratercula arctica) between 2021 and 2025 on Skellig Michael, County Kerry, Ireland (51.7707°N, 10.5405°W) to detect fine-scale vertical undulations (“wiggles”) in dives as proxies for prey-capture attempts. We used a broken-stick model to divide dives into segments and built a custom function to identify wiggles within segments. Wiggle occurrence differed significantly among dive phases (p < 0.001). Wiggles were most frequent during the ascent and bottom phases. Less than 10% of wiggles occurred during descent phases, despite descent making up 30.3% of the time spent diving. Our findings indicate that puffins, like other pursuit-diving predators, forage not only during the bottom phase but extensively while surfacing. More broadly, the integration of broken-stick segmentation with wiggle detection provides a simple, transferable framework for quantifying prey-capture attempts across pursuit-diving predators. This approach enhances inference from TDR data and contributes to a comparative understanding of how diving predators partition foraging effort within dives.

Keywords

Atlantic puffin , Auk , Dive patterns , Foraging , Seabird , TDR , Wiggles , [BEES]

Citation

Dedieu, A, Jessopp, M & Cox, S L 2026, 'Beyond dive shape: the identification of fine-scale vertical movements reveal within-dive behavioural structure in a pursuit-diving seabird', Marine Biology, vol. 173, no. 8, 126, pp. 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-026-04878-7