Publication Abstract

Does diet in Celtic Sea fishes reflect prey availability?

J.K. Pinnegar, V. Trenkel, A.N. Tidd, W. Dawson and M.H. Dubuit.

The fish community of the Celtic Sea has changed markedly over the past 30 years. Given such changes, we might expect that the diet of predatory species will have also varied in response.

In the present paper we study gut-contents data collected by French and English researchers in the Celtic Sea between 1975 and 1994. We consider how the length and weight of the prey relates to the size of the predator. We consider how diet composition changes with fish size, and we use French and English groundfish survey data to examine how diets have related to prey availability. We consider diets for cod, whiting, hake megrim, haddock, monkfish and pollack.

Reference:

J.K. Pinnegar, V. Trenkel, A.N. Tidd, W. Dawson and M.H. Dubuit. (2003). Does diet in Celtic Sea fishes reflect prey availability? Journal of Fish Biology 63 (Supplement A) 197-212