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Jellyfish and other gelata as food for four penguin species – insights from predator-borne videos
journal contribution
posted on 2017-10-01, 00:00 authored by J B Thiebot, John ArnouldJohn Arnould, A Gómez-Laich, K Ito, A Kato, T Mattern, H Mitamura, T Noda, Timothee Poupart, F Quintana, T Raclot, Y Ropert-Coudert, J E Sala, P J Seddon, Grace Sutton, K Yoda, A TakahashiJellyfish and other pelagic gelatinous organisms (“gelata”) are increasingly perceived as an important component of marine food webs but remain poorly understood. Their importance as prey in the oceans is extremely difficult to quantify due in part to methodological challenges in verifying predation on gelatinous structures. Miniaturized animal-borne video data loggers now enable feeding events to be monitored from a predator's perspective. We gathered a substantial video dataset (over 350 hours of exploitable footage) from 106 individuals spanning four species of non-gelatinous-specialist predators (penguins), across regions of the southern oceans (areas south of 30°S). We documented nearly 200 cases of targeted attacks on carnivorous gelata by all f our species, at all seven studied localities. Our findings emphasize that gelatinous organisms actually represent a widespread but currently under-represented trophic link across the southern oceans, even for endothermic predators, which have high energetic demands. The use of modern technological tools, such as animal-borne video data loggers, will help to correctly identify the ecological niche of gelata.
History
Journal
Frontiers in ecology and the environmentVolume
15Issue
8Pagination
437 - 441Publisher
John Wiley & SonsLocation
Chichester, Eng.Publisher DOI
ISSN
1540-9295eISSN
1540-9309Language
engPublication classification
C Journal article; C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journalCopyright notice
2017, Ecological Society of AmericaUsage metrics
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