The Burmeister's porpoise ( Phocoena spinipinnis ) is a small cetacean endemic to South America, yet its diet is poorly known along Argentina's northern coast. We analyzed stomach ( n = 18) and intestinal ( n = 2) contents of 18 stranded or bycaught individuals collected from 1996 to 2024 between San Bernardo and Necochea (36°42′–38°33′S), Buenos Aires, Argentina. From the nine individuals with contents, 12 prey species were i...

Milk production strategies, duration, and composition vary among mammals. Odontocete cetaceans exhibit a long lactation strategy characterized by high parental investment and prolonged nutritional dependence. Understanding the nutritional demands of these offspring during lactation is complex, particularly due to their aquatic lifestyle. This study examines the nutritional dynamics of endangered Franciscana dolphins ( Pontopor...

Lactation is a crucial reproductive stage in eutherian mammals and the most energetically and nutritionally expensive part of the life cycle. However, data on lactation parameters in cetaceans remain scattered and incomplete. In this paper, we present novel information on the nutritional compositions and fatty acid (FA) profiles of the milks of two small odontocete species that inhabit coastal waters of the southwest Atlantic...

Sightings and strandings of humpback whales ( Megaptera novaeangliae ) along the coast of Buenos Aires Province in Argentina were once sporadic but have increased by up to 640% since 2018. Here, we assess the trends and seasonality of occurrence and anthropogenic‐derived mortality in this population between 2003 and 2021. Most of the humpback whales found dead were young animals, and 27% of the stranded whales showed signs of...

Line transect aerial surveys are widely used for estimating abundance of biological populations, including threatened species. However, estimates obtained with data collected from aircraft are often underestimated because of visibility bias and bias in estimating group sizes from a fast-moving platform. An assessment of multiple sources of bias in aerial surveys were carried out in Brazilian coastal waters by experiments on mu...

Marine plastic pollution is projected to increase globally in the next few decades. This holds true for South America where the number of species that interacts with plastics is increasing. In this study, we explore for the first time the potential of certain charismatic species of marine turtles, mammals and seabirds as indicators of plastic pollution in the Río de la Plata (RdP), one of the largest and most important estuari...