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Dispersal is increasingly recognized as a process of fundamental importance in population dynamics and other aspects of biology. Concurrently, interest in age-dependent effects on survival, including actuarial senescence, has increased, especially in studies of long-lived seabirds. Nevertheless, datasets necessary for studying dispersal and age-dependent effects are few, as these require simultaneous data collection at two or more sites over many years. We conducted a 22-year capture-mark-recapture study of Common Terns Sterna hirundo at three breeding colonies 10–26 km apart in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, USA. All birds in the study were of known age (range 2–28 years, median 7 years, n = 3290) and 77% were of known sex. Estimates of adult recapture, survival and breeding dispersal rates were obtained for all age-classes from 2 to 20 years. Themodel that acquired 100% of the QAICc (Akaike's Information Criterion adjusted for small sample size and overdispersion) weight in our analysis included age-specificity in all parameters but no relationship with sex. Our study may be the first to demonstrate age-specificity in recapture, survival and breeding dispersal rates simultaneously, using a single model. Annual rates of breeding dispersal ranged from <0.01 to 0.27, with a population-weighted mean of 0.065; they decreased with increasing distance between colony sites and, unexpectedly, increased with age. Breeding dispersal did not increase consistently after years with predation on adults or after an attempt to displace birds from an oiled site. Survival rates did not vary among sites or years. Annual adult survival increased from 0.80 in 2-year-old birds to a maximum of approximately 0.88 around age 8 years and then declined to 0.76 at age 20 years, yielding strong evidence for actuarial senescence. The peak annual survival rate of 0.88 is at the low end of other estimates for Common Tern and in the lower part of the range recorded for other terns, but total numbers in the three colonies increased seven-fold during the study. This was part of a slower increase in the regional population, with net immigration into the study colonies.Our results demonstrate the biological significance of breeding dispersal in local population dynamics and age-related effects on survival and dispersal from a metapopulation of a long-lived seabird. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Atlantic Herring is a keystone species in several marine ecosystems, supporting intensive fisheries as well as many predators including seabirds. Biomass of this stock in eastern North America has declined considerably in recent years, potentially putting at risk populations of its predators. Although adult survival in seabirds is considered robust to moderate changes in food availability, it is also the life-history component most critical to sustaining populations of long-lived birds. To investigate the possibility that Atlantic Puffin survival has been affected by reduced abundance of its main prey, we analysed the encounter histories of 2999 Atlantic Puffins ringed on Machias Seal Island to estimate annual adult survival for the years 1999-2011 and assess trends in survival and the effects of several biological and environmental covariates. Features of Puffin biology and resighting procedures likely to introduce heterogeneity into our resighting probabilities were accounted for and models of survival were assessed using standard methods. We used the variance components procedure in Program MARK and survival estimates from a time-varying model to estimate the process variance (biological variation in survival) accounted for by suspected covariates of survival. Two proxies of food availability each explained more than half of the variation in annual survival: fishery landings of Atlantic Herring (52%) and per cent (by mass) of 1-group Herring in the diet of Puffin chicks (51%). In addition to these proxies, May sea-surface temperature accounted for 37% of variance in survival, but winter values of North Atlantic Oscillation showed no effect. Of those parameters of Puffin biology examined, chick growth rate explained 19% of the process variance in annual survival; laying date, fledging condition and fledging date all explained no variance. A decline in fishery landings of Herring since the early 1990s, and a concurrent decline in adult Puffin survival, reinforces concern for the health of the population of Herring, a keystone forage fish in this region, and of the community of marine predators in the Gulf of Maine that rely on Herring for their survival and reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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