Hi all
I take a group of my second year Biological Sciences students from Plymouth University to the Azores every September (it just about makes up for the rest of the year!). Hard job but someone has to do it. With a later flight time this year we have an extra half a day and want to take them "Whale Watching" (read, I want to do a pelagic). To make some sense of the exercise and to put some science into it, I wanted to do something on olfactory cues in food searching in seabirds. I thought it was pretty well accepted that seabirds follow miniscule amounts of DMS (dimethyl sulfide) to tell them where the algae and thus other food, might be. However, while I find a lot of newspaper type articles on this, I cant find any reports of the use of DMS at sea (I'd need to know a conc/carrier etc).
Does anyone here have any idea if this has been tried and anywhere I might find some information?
Thanks
O
I take a group of my second year Biological Sciences students from Plymouth University to the Azores every September (it just about makes up for the rest of the year!). Hard job but someone has to do it. With a later flight time this year we have an extra half a day and want to take them "Whale Watching" (read, I want to do a pelagic). To make some sense of the exercise and to put some science into it, I wanted to do something on olfactory cues in food searching in seabirds. I thought it was pretty well accepted that seabirds follow miniscule amounts of DMS (dimethyl sulfide) to tell them where the algae and thus other food, might be. However, while I find a lot of newspaper type articles on this, I cant find any reports of the use of DMS at sea (I'd need to know a conc/carrier etc).
Does anyone here have any idea if this has been tried and anywhere I might find some information?
Thanks
O