Hi Marmamers,
This may be of interest to those of you working on inshore cetacean diet:
Glenn Dunshea, Nélio B. Barros, Elizabeth J. Berens McCabe, Nicholas J.
Gales,Mark A. Hindell, Simon N. Jarman, and Randall S. Wells
Stranded dolphin stomach contents represent the free-ranging population's diet
Biol. Lett.. 2013 9 20121036; doi:10.1098/rsbl.2012.1036 (published 1 May 2013)
Abstract:
Diet is a fundamental aspect of animal ecology. Cetacean prey species are
generally identified by examining stomach contents of stranded individuals.
Critical uncertainty in these studies is whether samples from stranded animals
are representative of the diet of free-ranging animals. Over two summers, we
collected faecal and gastric samples from healthy free-ranging individuals of
an extensively studied bottlenose dolphin population. These samples were
analysed by molecular prey detection and these data compared with stomach
contents data derived from stranded dolphins from the same population collected
over 22 years. There was a remarkable consistency in the prey species
composition and relative amounts between the two datasets. The conclusions of
past stomach contents studies regarding dolphin habitat associations, prey
selection and proposed foraging mechanisms are supported by molecular data from
live animals and the combined dataset. This is the first explicit test of the
validity of stomach contents analysis for accurate population-scale diet
determination of an inshore cetacean.
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/3/20121036.abstract
The paper is open access and should be freely available.
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