Foraging behavior of northern elephant seals and mercury concentrations in blood and muscle

• Main Authors: Peterson, Sarah H., Ackerman, Joshua T., Costa, Daniel P.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: unknown
• Published: Dryad Digital Repository 2015
• Subjects: mesopelagic predator; spatial ecotoxicology; marine mammal; pinniped; biogeochemistry; methylmercury; North Pacific; Mirounga angustirostris; Pacific; Elephant Seals
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.tc8j2/1; http://datadryad.org/resource/doi:10.5061/dryad.tc8j2/1

We quantified variables for the full foraging trip (short and long foraging trip) to describe foraging behavior of northern elephant seals, using geography, diving behavior, and stable isotopes (carbon and nitrogen). Most seals were weighed upon recovery. If not, then RecoveryMassEstimated was recorded as 1, meaning that the recovery mass was estimated using body composition and morphometric measurements. The ToppID is the unique ID for the individual and the foraging trip that would link with the full diving and tracking file, housed at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Seal_ID is an ID that corresponds to each seal in this study and links with their individual histories, also housed at the University of California, Santa Cruz.