Fig 1.
Map of Ireland depicting surrounding water depth and study sites. Great Blasket Island (GBI) located off the southwest coast and Wexford Harbour (WH) on the southeast coast of Ireland.
Table 1.
Number of tagged seals.
Table 2.
Scat collection effort.
Table 3.
Grey seal diet composition.
Fig 2.
Modified Costello-Amundsen plots.
Plots of all prey in terms of their occurrence and importance by number for GBI (upper frame) and WH (lower frame). Species occurring in the upper left represent prey that were consumed rarely, but when they were consumed, accounted for a large proportion of the predators’ diet. Species in the lower left denote prey that occurred rarely and were of relatively low importance to the overall diet. Species occurring in the upper right represent important prey found within the majority of diet samples that also accounted for a large part of the total diet. Finally, despite occurring in high frequencies, those prey species located towards the lower right corner of the diagram, only made a small contribution to the diet.
Fig 3.
The total numbers of prey species which occurred only in the southwest and in the southeast coast seal diet.
Fig 4.
nMDS plot showing the multivariate patterns of prey species assemblages in all seal diet samples between each site. Each symbol represents an individual scat sample, with the relative distance between symbols representing (Bray-Curtis) similarity of prey assemblages (species and species abundance) between samples. The greater the relative distance the larger the dissimilarity between prey composition. The stress value of 0.2 suggests the data are a reasonable representation of the 3D structure.
Table 4.
ANOSIM results.
Table 5.
SIMPER analysis results.
Fig 5.
The total abundances of each guild detected in diet samples collected from both sampling sites across all seasons and all years.
Fig 6.
Minimum convex polygon results.
MCPs containing 50% of seal GPS locations for grey seals tagged at GBI and WH. MCPs were superimposed over sediment data obtained for the EMODnet portal.
Table 6.
Sediment type and water depth at each sampling site.