Date: January 18, 2017
Source: Universidad de Barcelona
Sea lion hunting by the Europeans
at the Atlantic coasts of South America -it started in the 19th Century and
continued up to the second half of the 20th century in Argentina and Uruguay-
changed its nutrition guidelines of these pinnipeds as well as the structure of
the coastal trophic network, according to the studies by the team codirected by
Lluís Cardona, from the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and
Environmental Sciences and the Biodiversity Research Institute of the
University of Barcelona (IRBio), and Enrique Crespo, from the Patagonian
National Center and the National University of Patagonia (Argentina).
The results of this study are
shown in two articles, published in the scientific journals Oecologia and Paleobiology,
its co-authors being Fabiana Saporiti and Lisette Zenteno (UB-IRBio), and
Damian G. Vales (Patagonian National Center), among others.
This research is one of the
results of the project Efectes de l'explotació humana sobre depredadors apicals
i l'estructura de la xarxa tròfica del Mar Argentí durant els darrers 6000 anys
(Effects of human exploitation on apex predators and structure of the trophic
network in the Argentinian sea over the last 6000 years), financially supported
by BBVA Foundation and led by Professor Àlex Aguilar (UB-IRBio), head of the
Research Group on Large Marine Vertebrates of the University of Barcelona.
A megafauna exploited by humans
in all oceans
Hunting and fishing usually
create a reduction in the abundance of bigger species. Therefore, megafauna is
considered to be one of the most threatened compounds of biodiversity. Marine
mammals are an essential element of megafauna in all oceans and they have been
extremely exploited by humans. However, knowing about the effects of this
exploitation on the functioning of food networks in marine ecosystems -a high
complex structural framework- is still a hard challenge for the scientists due
to the difficulty to perform manipulative experiments.
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