Demographic Reconstruction of Antarctic Fur Seals Supports the Krill Surplus Hypothesis.

ABSTRACT: Much debate surrounds the importance of top-down and bottom-up effects in the Southern Ocean, where the harvesting of over two million whales in the mid twentieth century is thought to have produced a massive surplus of Antarctic krill. This excess of krill may have allowed populations of other predators, such as seals and penguins, to increase, a top-down hypothesis known as the 'krill surplus hypothesis'. However, a lack of pre-whaling population baselines has made it challenging to investigate historical changes in the abundance of the major krill predators in relation to whaling. Therefore, we used reduced representation sequencing and a coalescent-based maximum composite likelihood approach to reconstruct the recent demographic history of the Antarctic fur seal, a pinniped that was hu

SUBMITTER: Hoffman JI 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8954904 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature