Predators forage by balancing the energy content of prey with the energy required to capture it, selecting prey based on their foraging strategy. In the Celtic Seas ecoregion, recent dietary data are lacking for the common dolphin ( Delphinus delphis ) despite concerns about declining body conditions and changes in prey communities over recent decades. Using conventional stomach content analysis of a large sample set (n = 138)...

For odontocetes, passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) can be used to differentiate between occurrence and foraging through analysis of click characteristics. Feeding buzzes and navigation/searching echolocation clicks of harbor porpoise ( Phocoena phocoena ) were differentiated within C‐POD data from northwest Ireland between 2009 and 2017. The spatiotemporal distribution of foraging behavior was investigated using generalized ad...

The Celtic Sea is a productive fishing ground, therefore identifying the relative importance of fishing and environmental factors on fish stock dynamics is crucial for developing our understanding of sustainable yields and to operationalize Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management (EBFM). We investigated the effect of environmental variables and fishing on the relative abundance inferred from catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE), of twelv...

By‐catch is the primary global conservation threat to populations of dolphins and porpoises. Despite protection for these protected species under its Habitats Directive, the European Union (EU) has failed to adequately assess and, where necessary, mitigate the by‐catch of small cetaceans. Management authority is diffuse, and the EU has no over‐arching, quantitative conservation objectives. To address this, we recommend that th...

Aim We investigated the population genetic structure of a highly mobile marine species, the striped dolphin, Stenella coeruleoalba (Meyen, 1833), along a geographical range with habitat transitions and historical dynamics to identify the causes of genetic divergence, and to assess the effect of past climate change on demography and population connectivity. Location North‐east Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. Methods Twent...

Despite no obvious barriers to gene flow in the marine realm, environmental variation and ecological specializations can lead to genetic differentiation in highly mobile predators. Here, we investigated the genetic structure of the harbour porpoise over the entire species distribution range in western Palearctic waters. Combined analyses of 10 microsatellite loci and a 5085 base‐pair portion of the mitochondrial genome reveale...

Scientists feel discomfort when they are asked to create certainty, where none exists, for use as an alibi in policy‐making. Recently, the scientific literature has drawn attention to some pitfalls of simulation‐based fisheries management‐strategy evaluation (MSE). For example, while estimates concerning central tendencies of distributions of simulation outcomes are usually fairly robust because they are conditioned on ample d...

The common dolphin has a widespread distribution and is relatively abundant in the temperate to subtropical waters of the eastern North Atlantic. However, it is not known whether different species, subspecies, or populations occur in this region. We examined 393 common dolphin skulls obtained from both stranded and bycaught individuals collected between 1901 and 2005. The series included skulls of 152 females and 199 males, fr...