Inner Workings: Technique to study poop offers a snapshot of diets ecosystems and climate

摘要

Hundreds of thousands of eider ducks once nested on the remote, rocky beaches of the Canadian Arctic. But sometime late in the 19th century, eiders began to disappear. Inuit oral traditions recall declines well before most scientific seabird censuses came so far north in the 1970s, says paleolimnologist Jules Blais at the University of Ottawa in Canada. To understand exactly when and why past duck populations crashed, Blais uses an emerging tool: stable isotope analysis of duck poop.