The Northern Argentine Sea

Historic foraging ecology of the endangered Lahille's bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus gephyreus) inferred by stable isotopes

“…Micropogonias furnieri is the main demersal fish target for the Argentinian coastal fleet, operating in Río de la Plata, being the most important prey for estuarine franciscanas dolphins inhabiting this estuary (Rodríguez et al, 2002). On the other hand, M. furnieri, C. guatucupa and P. pagrus are more commonly caught along the marine coasts of Buenos Aires (Marcovecchio et al, 2019) where C. guatucupa is the most important prey of the marine franciscana dolphin within this area (Rodríguez et al, 2002;Paso-Viola et al, 2014). Therefore, the high proportion of P. pagrus, P. brasiliensis and C. guatucupa in the diet of Period II dolphins can be interpreted as an indication of a mostly marine feeding habit, considering the recognized opportunistic habit of the species.…”

“…Furthermore, in order to test for regional and temporal differences in isotopic values, samples were divided in two periods: I)1903-1980 and II)1981-2016. The first period (hereafter, Period I) represents the previous stage to the large development of the bottom trawl industrial fishery along south Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina after 1967 (Yesaki and Bager, 1975;Defeo et al, 2009;Haimovici and Cardoso, 2017;Marcovecchio et al, 2019;Muniz et al, 2019). This development resulted in a substantial decrease in the industrial demersal landings in the following decades, when some of the main target species (i.e.…”

“…This development resulted in a substantial decrease in the industrial demersal landings in the following decades, when some of the main target species (i.e. Micropogonias furnieri, Cynoscion guatucupa, Macrodon atricauda, Paralonchurus brasiliensis) started to show signs of overexploitation (Gianelli and Defeo, 2017;Haimovici and Cardoso, 2017;Marcovecchio et al, 2019). Therefore, the second period (hereafter, Period II) considered samples collected during the decades after this increase in fishing effort, that potentially might affect coastal ecosystems along these countries.…”

The Second World Ocean Assessment

“…Changes in erosion and coastline impacts affect the economy of local communities and change the way they perceive natural coastal ecosystems on the Atlantic coast of South America as a whole (Bunicontro and others, 2015). In addition to a constant driver, such as changes in the oceanographic dynamics and their influence on coastal habitats, environmental disasters have been a key issue in the South-West Atlantic (Gil and others, 2019;Marcovecchio and others, 2019). In the past five years, there have been two inland mine tailing disasters as a result of which discharge reached the coastal zone, thus impacting different habitats, including reefs, sandy, muddy and rocky shores and communities in Brazil, and one oil spill that affected more than 3,000 km of coastline (Escobar, 2019;Soares and others, 2020).…”