ABSTRACT The black‐legged kittiwake ( Rissa tridactyla , hereafter ‘kittiwake’, conservation status ‘Vulnerable’) is a long‐lived, highly motile and wide‐ranging seabird. Breeding kittiwake colonies are abundant across the northern hemisphere. The kittiwake's life history and the spatial scale of its breeding distribution make understanding colony connectivity a challenge; current species management models kittiwake colonies as closed units. Here, we explored the use of Bayesian analysis of multilocus microsatellite genotypes in the program BayesAss (BA3) to infer dispersal and seasonal summer breeding movements (information‐gathering behaviour; prospecting) (collectively ‘connectivity’) of kittiwakes around the North Atlantic. This approach uses the concept of inheritance by descent (IBD) (the formulation of genotypes within a population mediated by inheritance) and Markov‐chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) resampling to quantify patterns of breeding movements among spatial aggregations of related individuals. Data comprised diploid microsatellites of the kittiwake and the common seabird tick ( Ixodes uriae ) sampled from the High Arctic to the lower southern boundary of the species between the years of 1992 and 2001. Kittiwake dispersal and summer breeding movements, the latter derived from tick microsatellites, were heterogenous among the sampled colonies. There was an east to west longitudinal trend in dispersal. Summer breeding movements were more localised, although still present at large spatial scales. Connectivity among kittiwake colonies was less likely across the Atlantic Ocean. This study supports the prevailing theory that geographic distance only weakly constrains connectivity among kittiwake colonies. Multimodal relationships between geographic distance and connectivity indicate that other factors, such as colony status and conspecific associations may be more important.
Cargill et al. (Sun,) studied this question.