Harbor seals, as generalist predators, can adjust their diet in response to shifts in prey availability; thus, their diet composition has the potential to act as a biodiversity indicator. This study examined the diet of harbor seals in the Skagerrak by analyzing otoliths from scat samples collected in 2020 and compared species composition to historical datasets from 1977/78 and 1989. The diet in 2020 encompassed 28 fish specie...

Empirical evidence has shown that historical exposure of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) to Baltic grey seals not only severely affected individual fitness, but also population growth rates and most likely caused the retarded recovery rate of the depleted population for decades. We constructed a new model which we term a toxicokinetic–toxicodynamic (TKTD) population model to quantify these effects. The toxicokinetic sub-model...

Graphical Abstract POPs in Antarctic Mammals.

An aspect of life history that has seen increasing attention in recent years is that of strategies for financing the costs of offspring production. These strategies are often described by a continuum ranging from capital breeding, in which costs are met purely from endogenous reserves, to income breeding, in which costs are met purely from concurrent intake. A variety of factors that might drive strategies toward a given point...

It is common to estimate the extinction probability for a vulnerable population using methods that are based on the mean and variance of the long‐term population growth rate. The numerical values of these two parameters are estimated from time series of population censuses. However, the proportion of a population that is registered at each census is typically not constant but will vary among years because of stochastic factors...

We present the first epidemiological data on the 2002 outbreak of phocine distemper virus (PDV) in European harbour seals ( Phoca vitulina ). The epizootic curve to date supports a mortality rate and probability of infection identical to that of the 1988 outbreak, which killed 58% of the population. Thus immunity is playing no significant role in the dynamics of the current outbreak. Because the timing of the outbreak is impor...