Maximizing dietary information retrievable from carcasses of Great Cormorants Phalacrocorax carbo using a combined morphological and molecular analytical approach

Avian carcasses can provide important information on the trophic ecology of birds. Usually, the number of carcasses available for examination is limited and therefore it is important to gain as much dietary information per specimen as possible. In piscivorous birds and raptors, the stomach has been the primary source of dietary information, whereas the gut (intestine) has so far been neglected as it usually contains only a few morphologically identifiable hard parts of prey. Molecular approaches have the potential to retrieve dietary information from the gut, although this has not yet been verified. As well as identifying the prey, it is important to estimate any secondary predation to avoid food web errors in dietary analyses. The assignment of accidentally consumed prey is notoriously difficult regardless of the prey identification approach used. In the present study, morphological and molecular analyses were, for the first time, combined to maximize the dietary information retrievable from the complete digestive tract of Great Cormorants Phalacrocorax carbo sinensis. Moreover, a novel approach based on predator–prey size ratios was applied to these piscivorous birds to minimize the number of samples that might contain secondarily predated prey. The stomach contents of the examined birds were found to provide the most dietary information when morphological and molecular analyses were used in combination. However, compared with the morphological approach, the molecular analysis increased the number of fish species detected by 39%. The molecular approach also permitted the identification of fish DNA in the Cormorant guts. Predator–prey size ratios derived from morphological analysis of fish hard parts can reduce the incidence of potential confounding influence of secondarily predated prey by 80%. Our findings demonstrate that a combination of morphological and molecular approaches maximizes the trophic information retrievable from bird carcasses.