Acceleration-triggered animal-borne videos show a dominance of fish in the diet of female northern elephant seals
| Autor: | Kaori Yoshino, Rachel R. Holser, Taiki Adachi, Patrick W. Robinson, Sarah H. Peterson, Daniel P. Costa, Akinori Takahashi, Luis A. Hückstädt, Yasuhiko Naito |
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| Přispěvatelé: | University of St Andrews. School of Biology |
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
0106 biological sciences
Seals Earless Physiology QH301 Biology Acceleration Foraging Video Recording Diving behavior Marine mammal Aquatic Science 010603 evolutionary biology 01 natural sciences Predation Merluccius QH301 Animals Marine ecosystem SDG 14 - Life Below Water Octopoteuthis Histioteuthis Molecular Biology Ecology Evolution Behavior and Systematics Bio-logging biology Taningia danae 010604 marine biology & hydrobiology DAS Feeding Behavior biology.organism_classification Diet Fishery Insect Science Female Animal Science and Zoology Mesopelagic zone |
| Popis: | This study was supported by funding from the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (23255001 and 15K14793), Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows (12 J04316), the Office of Naval Research grants N00014-10-1-0356 and N00014-13-1-0134, and the E&P Sound and Marine Life Joint Industry Project of the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers. Knowledge of the diet of marine mammals is fundamental to understanding their role in marine ecosystems and response to environmental change. Recently, animal-borne video cameras have revealed the diet of marine mammals that make short foraging trips. However, novel approaches that allocate video time to target prey capture events is required to obtain diet information for species that make long foraging trips over great distances. We combined satellite telemetry and depth recorders with newly developed date-/time-, depth- and acceleration-triggered animal-borne video cameras to examine the diet of female northern elephant seals during their foraging migrations across the eastern North Pacific. We obtained 48.2 h of underwater video, from cameras mounted on the head (n=12) and jaw (n=3) of seals. Fish dominated the diet (78% of 697 prey items recorded) across all foraging locations (range: 37-55°N, 122-152°W), diving depths (range: 238-1167 m) and water temperatures (range: 3.2-7.4°C), while squid comprised only 7% of the diet. Identified prey included fish such as myctophids, Merluccius sp. and Icosteus aenigmaticus, and squid such as Histioteuthis sp., Octopoteuthis sp. and Taningia danae Our results corroborate fatty acid analysis, which also found that fish are more important in the diet, and are in contrast to stomach content analyses that found cephalopods to be the most important component of the diet. Our work shows that in situ video observation is a useful method for studying the at-sea diet of long-ranging marine predators. Publisher PDF |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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