Lipids from stomach oil of procellariiform seabirds document the importance of myctophid fish in the Southern Ocean

• Main Authors: Yves Cherel, Patrick Mayzaud
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antarctic; Southern Ocean; Antarc*; Antarctic Krill; Pachyptila desolata; Puffinus tenuirostris
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.570.7953; http://www.cebc.cnrs.fr/publipdf/2007/CLO52.pdf

We investigated the relative importance of myctophid fish and Antarctic krill in the diet of adult flying seabirds of the Southern Ocean. The main prey of short-tailed shearwaters Puffinus tenuirostris (P. ten.), white-chinned petrels Procellaria aequinoctialis (P. aeq.), blue petrels Halobaena caerulea (H. cae.), thin-billed prions Pachyptila belcheri (P. bel.), and Antarctic prions Pachyptila desolata (P. des.) were mostly deduced from the lipid analysis of adult stomach oils. More than 97 % of the 125 analyzed oils mainly consisted of wax esters (WEs) and triacylglycerols (TAGs) (.70 % of total lipids). WE fatty alcohol (FAlc), WE fatty acid (FA), and TAG-FA profiles clearly segregated P. aeq. from P. ten., with smaller, but still significant, differences among the three other