ArticleScience advances2021
Forced into an ecological corner: Round-the-clock deep foraging on small prey by elephant seals.
Article in Science advances, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Genome assembly and annotation of a deep-diving pinniped, the northern elephant seal (Mirounga angustirostris).The Journal of heredity · 2026Article
- Six decades of animal accelerometry: trends, applications, and future directions.Movement ecology · 2026Review
- Spatiotemporal Variation in Marine Mammal Antipredator Behaviors Resulting From a Predation Pinch Point.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Intraspecific variation in prey quality affects the consumption rates of top predators.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- The growing methodological toolkit for identifying and studying social learning and culture in non-human animals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Deep-sea ascending predation by king penguin and its prey reaction observed by animal-borne video camera.Ecology · 2025Article
- Article
- Low hunting costs in an expensive marine mammal predator.Science advances · 2024Article
- Individual variation in life-history timing: synchronous presence, asynchronous events and phenological compensation in a wild mammal.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Breaking the fast: first report of dives and ingestion events in molting southern elephant seals.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Large sensory volumes enable Southern elephant seals to exploit sparse deep-sea prey.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Predictive model of sperm whale prey capture attempts from time-depth data.Movement ecology · 2023Article
- Linking movement and dive data to prey distribution models: new insights in foraging behaviour and potential pitfalls of movement analyses.Movement ecology · 2023Article
- Effects of disease on foraging behaviour and success in an individual free-ranging northern elephant seal.Conservation physiology · 2023Article
- Whiskers as hydrodynamic prey sensors in foraging seals.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Key questions in marine mammal bioenergetics.Conservation physiology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Small mesopelagic fishes dominate the world's total fish biomass, yet their ecological importance as prey for large marine animals is poorly understood. To reveal the little-known ecosystem dynamics, we identified prey, measured feeding events, and quantified the daily energy balance of 48 deep-diving elephant seals throughout their oceanic migrations by leveraging innovative technologies: animal-borne smart accelerometers and video cameras. Seals only attained positive energy balance after feeding 1000 to 2000 times per day on small fishes, which required continuous deep diving (80 to 100% of each day). Interspecies allometry suggests that female elephant seals have exceptional diving abilities relative to their body size, enabling them to exploit a unique foraging niche on small but abundant mesopelagic fish. This unique foraging niche requires extreme round-the-clock deep diving, limiting the behavioral plasticity of elephant seals to a changing mesopelagic ecosystem.
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Registered trials
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