phillips MU06035.qxd - CSIRO Publishing

1 downloads 0 Views 56KB Size Report
offal and discards (Freeman 1998; Phillips et al. 1999a;. Catard et al. 2000; Arata and Xavier ... For albatrosses, sam- pling of pellets regurgitated voluntarily by ...
CSIRO PUBLISHING

Emu, 2006, 106, 305–308

www.publish.csiro.au/journals/emu

Efficacy and effects of diet sampling of albatross chicks Richard A. Phillips British Antarctic Survey, Natural Environment Research Council, High Cross, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 0ET, UK. Email: [email protected]

Abstract. Although a variety of techniques (including water-offloading, and spontaneous and induced regurgitation) are used routinely to obtain fresh stomach samples from seabirds, there have been few studies of their efficacy or potential deleterious effects. In this study, sampling of Black-browed (Thalassarche melanophrys) and Grey-headed (T. chrysostoma) Albatross chicks by induced regurgitation had no effect on subsequent survival or fledging mass. In addition, the samples obtained were large (on average, 676 g and 756 g, respectively, which was 19% and 23% heavier than the average meal mass in a previous study). Notwithstanding the analytical biases associated with differential prey-digestion rates (which also apply to samples from adults), the advantages of this technique are that it is non-invasive, rapid (