Life Sciences Commons^™

Integrating Complementary Methods To Improve Diet Analysis In Fishery-Targeted Species, Jordan K. Matley, Gregory E. Maes, Floriaan Devloo-Delva, Roger Huerlimann, Gladys Chua, Andrew J. Tobin, Aaron T. Fisk, Colin A. Simpfendorfer, Michelle R. Heupel

Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research Publications

Developing efficient, reliable, cost-effective ways to identify diet is required to understand trophic ecology in complex ecosystems and improve food web models. A combination of techniques, each varying in their ability to provide robust, spatially and temporally explicit information can be applied to clarify diet data for ecological research. This study applied an integrative analysis of a fishery-targeted species group—Plectropomus spp. in the central Great Barrier Reef, Australia, by comparing three diet-identification approaches. Visual stomach content analysis provided poor identification with ~14% of stomachs sampled resulting in identification to family or lower. A molecular approach was successful with prey from …