Fonteneau et al. – 2009 – Relationships between bird morphology and prey selection in two sympatric Great Cormorant Phalacrocorax carbo subspecies during winter. Abstract Variation in bird morphology (notably sex size dimorphism) has been suggested to contribute to differences in food use between individuals. We explore the hypothesis of food partitioning (diet overlap and prey size selection) ...

With a rapidly changing climate, there is an increasing need to predict how species will respond to changes in the physical environment. One approach is to use historic data to estimate the past influence of environmental variation on important demographic parameters and then use these relationships to project the abundance of a population or species under future climate scenarios. However, as ...

Newcastle disease virus (NDV), a member of the genus Avulavirus of the family Paramyxoviridae, is the causative agent of Newcastle disease (ND), a highly contagious disease that affects many species of birds and which frequently causes significant economic losses to the poultry industry worldwide. Virulent NDV (vNDV) is exotic in poultry in the United States; however, the virus has been frequen...

When organisms with similar phenotypes have conflicting management and conservation initiatives, approaches are needed to differentiate among subpopulations or discrete groups. For example, the eastern metapopulation of the double-crested cormorant (Phalacrocorax auritus) has a migratory phenotype that is culled because they are viewed as a threat to commercial and natural resources, whereas re...

Dioxins including 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) induce various toxic effects through the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) signaling pathway. Here, we investigated the structural and functional characteristics and molecular evolution of multiple AhRs in black-footed albatross (Phoebastria nigripes) and common cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo). We report the complementary DNA sequences ...

Outbreaks of morbidity and mortality in double-crested cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus) along Florida's Gulf Coast have occurred sporadically for at least 30 yr. During these outbreaks, the Clinic for the Rehabilitation of Wildlife, located on Sanibel Island in Florida, has admitted a substantial number of cormorants with consistent presentation of primarily neurologic clinical signs. In orde...

The south Atlantic coast supports one of the highest assemblages non-breeding double-crested cormorants ( Nannopterum auritum ) known and is a convergence area for menhaden Brevoortia tyrannus during winter months. We surveyed along North Carolina used bioenergetics approach to estimate potential consumption. estimated cormorant numbers using network repeatable aerial transects outer (366 km) w...

Of the 6 cormorant species that inhabit the North Pacific, the Pelagic Cormorant (Phalocrocorax pelagicus) is the smallest and most widely distributed (Hobson 1997). Pelagic Cormorants breed from Baja California in the eastern Pacific north to the Bering and Chukchi Seas, and south across the western Pacific to southern China. North America supports an estimated one-third of the global populati...