ScienceDaily (Nov. 21, 2012) — In the marine
world, high-energy prey make for high-energy predators. And to survive, such marine
predators need to sustain the right kind of high-energy diet. Not just any prey
will do, suggests a new study by researchers from the University of British
Columbia and University of La Rochelle, in France.
Published
November 21 in the online journal PLOS ONE, the study is the first to show
that the survival of whales and dolphins depends on the quality of their diets
and this plays an important role in conservation.
"The
conventional wisdom is that marine mammals can eat anything," says
co-author Andrew Trites, a marine mammal expert at UBC. "However, we found
that some species of whales and dolphins require calorie rich diets to survive
while others are built to live off low quality prey -- and it has nothing to do
with how big they are."
The
team compared the diets of 11 species of whales, dolphins and porpoises in the
Northeast Atlantic Ocean, and found differences in the qualities of prey
consumed that could not be explained by the different body sizes of the
predators. The key to understanding the differences in their diets was to look
at their muscle performance.
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