Diet of demersal sharks and chimaeras inferred by fatty acid profiles and stomach content analysis

By H. Pethybridge, Ross K. Daley, P. Nichols. 2011

112 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Obtaining adequate dietary information for many shark and chimaera species has long been a challenge for ecosystem managers, largely due to logistical difficulties in the collection of large sample sizes required for stomach content analyses. Here, we use multivariate analysis of signature fatty acid (FA) profiles as a complementary method to examine the diet composition of 16 demersal shark and chimaera species, collected off south eastern Australia. Comparative results of FA profiles of potential prey and chondrichthyan species mostly agree with the stomach content data. Multivariate analysis correctly classified chimaeras as prominent low-order and benthic consumers, medium-sized dogfish as predators of mid-trophic fish and squid, catsharks as dominant cephalopod consumers, and larger and deeper dwelling dogfish as feeders of bathypelagic fish, squid and feeding on higher order species (cetaceans and seals). Our results demonstrate that signature FA analysis can be applied in dietary studies of sharks and chimaeras to (1) distinguish interspecific differences in general resource (diet and habitat) use patterns; (2) identify degrees of dietary specialisation; and (3) detect niche partitioning of resources by co-occurring species. The FA profiling approach is particularly valuable where sample numbers are likely to be low, such as for these deep-sea and threatened organisms.

Subfields: Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3411e3ea1cad63c82af49454877e42cb5d2ff8f1

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. S. Nicol
2. Joan Navarro
3. A. Lorrain
4. C. Barría
5. J. Llopiz
6. J. Young
7. Marta Coll
8. C. Choy

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

1. Marta Coll
2. C. Barría
3. J. Llopiz
4. R. Olson
5. M. Gibbons
6. L. Couturier
7. Anthony J. Richardson
8. S. Pierce

Citations in the corpus

• The trophodynamics of marine top predators: Current knowledge, recent advances and challenges (2015, background): “, 2012) and signature fatty acid analysis (Pethybridge et al., 2011) are allowing time-integrated dietary signatures to be acquired based on minimal numbers of specimens.”
• Diet of whale sharks Rhincodon typus inferred from stomach content and signature fatty acid analyses (2013, methodology): “Stomach content analyses require a large sample size to provide quantitative data (Pethybridge et al. 2011), can overestimate certain prey groups (Richardson et al. 2000), and only describe the most recent meal (Iverson et al. 2004) which, for whale sharks, is likely to be of coastal origin since…”
• Unravelling the ecological role and trophic relationships of uncommon and threatened elasmobranchs in the western Mediterranean Sea (2015, background): “…methodology allows high levels of taxonomic resolution, some marine predators such as elasmobranchs often show a high frequency of empty stomachs, and the prey items that are recovered are often skewed towards those that are more difficult to digest (Pethybridge et al. 2011, Navarro et al. 2014).”