Effects of anthropogenic food resources on yellow‐legged gull colony size on Mediterranean islands

Yellow‐legged gull Larus michahellis populations have been studied on three archipelagos consisting of 20 islands distributed along 80 km of the French Mediterranean coastline. Population changes were analyzed between 1920 and 2006. In the first decades following their settlement on these islands, the yellow‐legged gull populations showed a continuous exponential growth in the three archipelagos, in agreement with an annual geometric growth rate...