Fisheries and Oceans Canada has a requirement to conduct a captive feeding experiment on Steller sea lions. This is to test and provide validation of the genetic analysis of scats to determine pinniped diets; a technique currently employed by DFO in field-studies.
Specifically:
Generate a statistically robust, known-diet sample by collecting Steller sea lion scats from a captive animal feeding trial. The study will vary the proportion of 5 representative pinniped prey species from the NE Pacific to create 8 diet scenarios and be subdivided into 4 feeding trials.
Quantify the inherent (uncorrected) bias in using primary metabarcoding data to estimate relative prey intake from sea lion scat.
Establish a genetic correction factor (GCF) for each prey item. Also, test the effect of diet proportion and prey proximate composition on GCFs to potentially establish a set of generic proportional genetic correction factors (pGCF) for a broader range of prey items and diet profiles.
