A new article on the movement ecology of pelagic predators has been published in the Movement Ecology journal freely available from http://www.movementecologyjournal.com/content/2/1/8. The conclusions of this article are "Directly quantifying the energy needed for animal movements leads us to understand how foragers should move across the landscape in order to maximise net energy gain allowing the testing of predictions derived from optimal foraging theory. By coupling energy-budget models and behavioural mode analysis, we were able (1) to identify clusters of individuals showing different proportions of each behavioural mode, (2) to characterise those clusters following previously described foraging strategies and (3) to energetically characterise each foraging strategy with the final aim of testing optimal foraging theory predictions. We acknowledge that our results are species-specific but our novel methodological approach can be widely applied to other far-ranging animals and offer new insights on the potential effects of the predicted future increase of westerly winds on the biology of pelagic habitats in the southern oceans".
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