Weddell seal tracking data from the Weddell Sea (2011)

This animation (.gif) comprises locations from 19 adult Weddell seals (Leptonychotes weddellii) instrumented in February 2011 with telemetry devices. These devices were Sea Mammal Research Unit Conductivity-Temperature-Depth Satellite Relay Data Loggers. These are animal-attached loggers that are manufactured and programmed by the Sea Mammal Research Unit Instrumentation Group at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Ethical approval for this work was obtained from the University of St Andrews Animal Welfare and Ethics Committee, and from the corresponding committee at the British Antarctic Survey.

This dataset is linked to the manuscript Photopoulou et al. 2020 "Sex-specific variation in the use of vertical habitat by a resident Antarctic top predator" Proceedings of the Royal Society B (http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.1447) and a preprint on bioRxiv (https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.15.152009).

The locations are the product of fitting a statistical model to the observed ARGOS location data, taking account of the error class. This animation does not show the originally observed locations. The model used was a continuous time state-space model implemented in the R package foieGras by Ian Jonsen and Toby Patterson (2019) foieGras: Fit Continuous-Time State-Space and Latent Variable Models for Filtering Argos Satellite (and Other) Telemetry Data and Estimating Movement Behaviour. R package version 0.4.01. <https://cran.r-project.org/package=foieGras>

The animation was created in R (R Core Team (2019). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL https://www.R-project.org/) using the moveVis package by Jakob Schwalb-Willmann (2019). moveVis: Movement Data Visualization. R package version 0.10.2. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=moveVis

The background satellite image is generated by selecting the option [map_service = "mapbox"] in the moveVis function frames_spatial() that was used to generate the .gif file. This uses satellite maps from https://www.mapbox.com/maps/

Please note: the background satellite image is static and does not represent the sea ice conditions experienced by the seals in this dataset.