Poop, aka scat, can tell us a lot about a species. In particular, it is one of the best ways for us to understand what that species eats. Want to know about the diet of a given species? Collect some poop and find out. But one of the limitations of traditional methods of diet analysis is that they can tell you occurrence, but not how much (what percentage) that prey species makes up of the diet. This is critical to understand for ecosystem dynamics and managing populations. In the Salish Sea there is particular interest in who is consuming the most salmon (particularly species like Chinook, Coho and Steelhead).  In trying to manage salmon populations to save the Southern Resident Killer Whales (who eat mainly Chinook), other species have come under attack for the reason that salmon populations are crashing. One of these species is the harbor seal.  Join us as we learn about a new diet analysis study using DNA metabarcoding (from scat), and how it can help us better understand the diet of Salish Sea harbor seals, how much of each species they are eating, if that includes a significant amount of salmon that could negatively affect those fish populations, and how this dataset can continue to help us answer questions like these in the future.

Paper freely available: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01152-5

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