Advances in DNA sequencing technology have revolutionised the field of molecular analysis of trophic interactions and it is now possible to recover counts of food DNA sequences from a wide range of dietary samples. But what do these counts mean? To obtain an accurate estimate of a consumer’s diet should we work strictly with datasets summarising frequency of occurrence of different food taxa, or is it possible to use relative number of sequences? Both approaches...

Blue whales are little studied, face significant anthropogenic threats and within the Northern Indian Ocean, have a restricted range, making them an archetype for conservation needs of megafauna around the world. We studied feeding behaviour of blue whales using dietary DNA metabarcoding of faecal samples. While globally blue whale populations feed predominantly on Euphausiidae, 87 % of prey DNA amplicons extracted from faecal samples from this population were sergestid shrimp, demonstrating that blue whales can...

Macroalgae underpin most temperate inshore ecosystems, but increasing macroalgal loss, fragmentation and range contractions are eroding connectivity among populations. Understanding loss, and predicting the likelihood of recovery, is dependent on knowledge of population connectivity and how it is mediated by variability in local seascapes. Although many studies of marine connectivity have focussed on influences of geographic distance on genetic structure, the contribution of intervening habitat is rarely considered. We tested the extent to which geographic...

Age structure is a fundamental aspect of animal population biology. Age is strongly related to individual physiological condition, reproductive potential and mortality rate. Currently, there are no robust molecular methods for age estimation in birds. Instead, individuals must be ringed as chicks to establish known-age populations, which is a labour intensive and expensive process. The estimation of chronological age using DNA methylation is emerging as a robust approach in mammals including humans, mice and some...