Supplementary text from Population-specific sex and size variation in long-term foraging ecology of belugas and narwhals

• Main Authors: Marie Louis (10030865), Mikkel Skovrind (5167514), Eva Garde (7998386), Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen (7869812), Paul Szpak (10030868), Eline D. Lorenzen (3296127)
• Format: Other Non-Article Part of Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Ecology; stable isotopes; Arctic cetaceans; carbon; nitrogen; Arctic; Greenland; Beluga*; East Greenland; narwhal*
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13637507.v1

Intraspecific variation in resource use by individuals of different age, sex or size may reflect differing energetic requirements and physiological constraints. Males and females often show differences in diet due to sexual size dimorphism, different life histories and/or habitat use. Here, we investigate how sex and size influence the long-term foraging ecology of belugas and narwhals in Greenland, using stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen from bone collagen. We show that males have a higher trophic level and a larger ecological niche than females in West Greenland belugas and in East Greenland narwhals. In addition, for these two populations, we find that δ 15 N increases with size, particularly in males. We hypothesize that sexual size dimorphism together with strong maternal investment drive these differences. By contrast, we find no differences in foraging ecology between sexes in West Greenland narwhals and observe no influence of size on the trophic level. This may reflect the influence of interspecific competition in West Greenland, where the distributions of belugas and narwhals overlap, and/or geographic resource partitioning among different summer aggregations of narwhals. Our results suggest that sex and size variations in the diet are population dependent, and likely the result of varying ecological interactions.