Feathers as a Tool to Assess Mercury Contamination in Gentoo Penguins: Variations at the Individual Level.

ABSTRACT: Feathers have been widely used to assess mercury contamination in birds as they reflect metal concentrations accumulated between successive moult periods: they are also easy to sample and have minimum impact on the study birds. Moult is considered the major pathway for mercury excretion in seabirds. Penguins are widely believed to undergo a complete, annual moult during which they do not feed. As penguins lose all their feathers, they are expected to have a low individual-variability in feather mercury concentration as all feathers are formed simultaneously from the same somatic reserves. This assumption is central to penguin studies that use feathers to examine the annual or among-individual variation in mercury concentrations in penguins. To test this assumption, we measured the mercury

SUBMITTER: Pedro S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4564222 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature