Authors
MJ Rayner, BJ Dunphy, K Lukies, NJ Adams, M Berg, L Kozmian-Ledward, MH Pinkerton, SJ Bury
Publication date
2021/11/11
Journal
Marine Ecology Progress Series
Volume
678
Pages
171-182
Description
Globally, human population growth, its associated pollution and the vast scale of industrialised fisheries are having negative impacts on oceanic food webs, affecting top predators such as seabirds. We used stable isotope (δ 15 N and δ 13 C) analyses of feathers to investigate the contemporary structure and long-term changes in a near-shore community of 5 seabird species in northern Aotearoa New Zealand. Feathers were collected from museum specimens or live individuals (collected between 1878 and 2019) in Tīkapa Moana, the Hauraki Gulf, a marine habitat increasingly threatened by overfishing and urbanisation. To tease out the effects of baseline ecosystem versus seabird distributional changes, we analysed muscle isotope values of forage fishes collected over 43 yr (1976-2019) and provide isotopic data from contemporary prey species sampled within the region. Contemporary δ 15 N and δ 13 C values …
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