In addition to this suggestion being made for pilot whales and T. sagittatus off the Faroe Islands (Desportes and Mouritsen 1993, Zachariassen 1993, Jákupsstovu 2002), pilot this website whales have also been reported to be associated with Illex illecebrosus off Newfoundland (Mercer 1975) and Loligo pealei and Scomber scombrus off the United States (Payne and Heinemann 1993). The three main prey categories for pilot whales identified in our study are also among the most important cephalopod species marketed

in Spain and Portugal, with mean annual landings in Galicia alone of 1,423 tons and 2,800 tons, for Eledone cirrhosa and Octopus vulgaris respectively and 3,154 tons of ommastrephids, between 1997 and 2010 (http://www.pescadegalicia.com). Little is known on the abundance of noncommercial cephalopods since many of these species live in oceanic open waters and therefore they are rarely found in research surveys which tend

to cover mainly fish resources in shelf waters. Because of this lack of data, the assumption that pilot whales feed on the most abundant prey species, so that diet differences would be due to the local availability of potential prey, is difficult to prove since there is no contemporary information on the local abundance of many of the prey species (and sizes) identified in the diet. Besides the variation in pilot whale feeding habits in relation to geographical LBH589 price area, evidence of ontogenetic changes in diet was detected in our samples. Larger whales ingested a higher number of E. cirrhosa, this relationship reaching an asymptote at around 350 cm whale length, i.e., before learn more the animals normally reach sexual maturity (Bloch et al. 1993), and also more fish.

There was also a nonsignificant tendency for larger whales to eat fewer ommastrephid squids of the genera Illex/Todaropsis. Smaller whales, in contrast, showed a more varied diet. Juvenile whales could be limited in their ability to capture prey, either due to inexperience or physiological limitations. Thus they may not be able to swim as fast as adults, perhaps an issue for the capture of fast swimming prey species or may lack the capacity to carry out deep and/or long dives needed to reach and search the seafloor for benthic octopus, at least in deeper waters. Variation in the diet of individuals of different reproductive status, length and age has been previously described for this species (Desportes and Mouritsen 1993), as well as for other odontocetes such as bottlenose dolphin (Blanco et al. 2001, Santos et al. 2007), common dolphin, Delphinus delphis, (Silva 1999), and harbor porpoise, Phocoena phocoena (Santos et al. 2004).