Par Susan GALLON, post-doctorante au Centre for Marine Biodiversity and Biotechnology, Heriot Watt University
Southern elephant seals (Mirounga leonina) range widely throughout the Southern Ocean and are associated with important habitats (e.g., ice edges, shelf) where they accumulate energy (prey) to fuel their reproductive efforts on land. Knowledge of their fine scale foraging behaviour and individual foraging strategies, however, are limited. In this talk I will briefly present the result of a recent study where accelerometers were used to identify foraging events. Then I will present results obtained from the analyses of stable isotope (SI) concentration on consecutive sections of whole whiskers for 119 southern elephant seals from Elephant Island (61˚13’5 55˚23’W). We also combined SI analyses and satellite telemetry data for 29 individuals to better depict individual foraging strategies.
