Use of guard hairs to identify coastal mustelids in Patagonia

作者：Gomez Jonatan J^*; Cassini Marcelo H

来源：Revista de Biologia Marina y Oceanografia, 2010, 45(2): 365-370.

• Southern river otter
• marine otter
• American mink

The use of prey hairs found in predator faeces with the purpose of species recognition has been successfully utilized. In this study, a method was developed to discriminate between hairs from aquatic mustelids of Patagonia: the native otters Lontra provocax and L. felina, and the introduced mink Neovison vison. We found that the relationship between the width of the medulla and the total width (medulla+scales) in the zone of maximum width of the hair, allows effectively separating Lontra spp. from Neovison sp. in almost all samples. With these results, we developed a dichotomic guide that allows discriminating 100% of hair at the level of genera, and 58.3% of hair at the level of species within Lontra.

• 出版日期2010