Abstract
Calonectris diomedea is a colonial Procellariiform breeding on Mediterranean islands. The stomach oil produced during chick rearing is a peculiar trait of this species. The composition of the stomach oil is likely to reflect the composition of the prey ingested and might reveal the contaminants uptake with prey becoming a possible tool for the marine pollution monitoring. We examined the concentration of 15 trace elements by ICP-MS and direct mercury analyser. The principal component analysis revealed a heterogeneous pattern of metal concentration, showing a significant separation between samples collected 20 and 70 days after hatching. The data obtained in this work give preliminary information on the feeding habits and breeding ecology of Linosa's colony of Scopoli's shearwater. The trace metals variability found suggest that the stomach oil may have a role as trophic markers to understand predator-prey relationships and to have evidence on the accumulation of pollutants in the latter.
Highlights
Seabirds’ life-history traits are determined by the spatial and tem poral variability of food resources in the marine environment (Ricklefs, 1990)
We examined the concentration of 15 trace elements by Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) and direct mercury analyser
The differences in trace metals contents between stomach oil samples collected at day 20 and day 70 suggest that Scopoli’s shearwaters of Linosa island adopt a targeted strategy for provisioning their chicks, probably related to the different nutritional needs during the develop ment
Summary
Seabirds’ life-history traits are determined by the spatial and tem poral variability of food resources in the marine environment (Ricklefs, 1990). The Scopoli’s shearwater (Calonectris diomedea) is a long-distance migrant and colonial Procellariiform breeding on Mediterranean islands (Sangster et al, 2012). Apart from the incubation period, Scopoli’s shearwaters visit the colony mainly at night to feed their chicks (Rubolini et al, 2014). In Atlantic waters, the diet of Cory’s shearwater Calonectris borealis, a species close to the Scopoli’s shearwaters (Sangster et al, 2012), comprises predominantly epipelagic and mesopelagic fish and squid (Thibault et al, 1997) which are capable of accumulating pollutants such as trace metals (Anan et al, 2005; Shalini et al, 2020; Carravieri et al, 2020). Several methods are used to investigate the diet of seabirds; these include both the conventional sampling of food regurgitation, contents of pellets regurgitated by adults and samples offloaded from chicks by “stomach-pumping” (Furness and Camphuysen, 1997; Jarman et al, 1996)
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