Beyond dive shape: the identification of fine-scale vertical movements reveal within-dive behavioural structure in a pursuit-diving seabird
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Date
2026-06-22
Authors
Dedieu, Astrid
Jessopp, Mark
Cox, Sam L.
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Abstract
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.
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© 2026, the Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Keywords
Atlantic puffin , Auk , Dive patterns , Foraging , Seabird , TDR , Wiggles , [BEES] , Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics , Aquatic Science , Ecology
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
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