| Titre : | Diet and habitat use of scoters Melanitta in the Western Palearctic - a brief overview |
| Auteurs : | A. D. Fox, Auteur |
| Type de document : | Article |
| Dans : | Wildfowl (54 2003) |
| Article en page(s) : | 163-182 |
| Langues: | Anglais |
| Résumé : | If patterns of scoter distribution and abundance are to be understood, there is a need to know upon which prey items these birds feed, how they obtain these prey items and the habitats from which these food items are most easily harvested. Dietary studies and descriptions of habitats exploited by Common and Velvet Scoter in the non-breeding season are reviewed. The existing literature strongly suggests that, outside of the breeding season, these species forage mainly upon marine bivalve molluscs (especially those less than 4cm long) that live on the surface or within the upper 3cm of clean, coarse, sandy substrates in waters less than 20m deep. Although there is a large energetic cost to diving, handling and crushing such prey prior to digestion, such sedentary prey items often occur in very high densities, offering a locally abundant and predictable feeding resource. Since single species often dominate the diet, but dominant food items differ between feeding areas, it seems likely that scoters simply take whatever prey is locally available in sufficient abundance to fulfil nutritional needs. Large differences in documented prey size frequency distributions suggest that scoters may not select for specific prey size classes below an upper digestive limit. However, in the absence of any precise understanding of how scoters obtain their prey, nor any simultaneous studies of available benthic food abundance and size class distributions in scoter diets, it is not possible to confirm if differences simply reflect differences in profitability between different prey at different sites at different times of the year. There remains a considerable need to study the basic feeding ecology and the behaviour of scoters and their prey if their patterns of distribution and abundance are to be better understood. |
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