Figure 1.
Sampling locations for Adélie penguin faeces.
Sampling sites are named after the nearest Antarctic station. ‘Mawson’ samples were collected from Bechervaise Island (67°35′S, 62°49′E). ‘Davis’ samples were collected at Hop Island (68°50′S, 77°43′E). ‘Casey’ samples were collected at Whitney Point (66°16′S, 110°31′E) or at Blakeney Point (66°14′S, 110°34′E) which are 3.5 km apart. Approximate sea-route distances among sites are X ∼ 700 km, Y ∼ 1400 km and Z ∼ 2100 km.
Table 1.
Samples used in this study.
Table 2.
Oligonucleotides used in this study.
Table 3.
Categories and taxa for sequence aggregation.
Figure 2.
Numerical summaries of DNA based diet analyses for all samples in this study. The food species groups are ranked in order of mean proportion across all samples. The percentage frequency of occurrence of food groups in all samples and the percentage frequency of samples that only had one food item are given. The frequency with which samples in the population had co-occurrence of food items on the Y and X axes of the grid is given. Grey squares indicate no value.
Figure 3.
Female and male Adélie penguin diet.
A comparison of male and female diet for all samples in this study that produced recognisable food DNA sequences and which had a successful molecular sexing assay result. The pie charts show the estimated mean and standard error of the proportions of DNA sequences from each food group for females (A) and males (B).
Figure 4.
Spatial and temporal comparisons of Adélie penguin population diet.
Summary pie charts showing the population means of proportions of diet items for all twelve sample sets analysed in this study. The year and sampling location are indicated above each pie chart with the number of scats analysed in brackets after that. Mean percentages of DNA sequences for each group of food species and the standard error of the estimate are given. Four types of comparison among the samples are made. Comparison (A) is of Inter-regional diet differences among samples from Mawson, Davis and Casey collected during the Créche phase of the breeding cycle in 2012. A smaller-scale spatial comparison is shown in (D) within the Casey region between two samples collected in 2008. Inter-annual comparisons are shown in (B) for samples collected at Mawson among ‘Créche’ samples in 2010,2011 and 2012 and ‘Guard’ samples in 2010, 2011 and 2012. Within-season comparisons are shown in (C) for samples collected at ‘Incubation’,’Guard’ and ‘Créche’ phases of the cycle at Davis in 2012. Results of Mantel tests indicating overall similarity or differences between population diet ratios are indicated.
Figure 5.
Parasites and unicellular eukaryotes in Adélie penguin scats.
Sequences classified as parasites (A) and unicellular eukaryotes (B) identified in all penguin scats analysed in this study. The pie charts show the estimated mean and standard error of the proportions of each sequence type with the percentage FOC in brackets.