Abstract

…the diet of the Yangtze finless porpoise has been poorly known for a long time because of the lack of studies of stomach contents. Until now, only one study (Chen et al. 1980) has examined stomach contents and that was ofa single porpoise, which showed consumption of at least three species of fish that occur within the lower water column.

Development of next-generation sequencing (NGS) techniques has enabled accurate analyses of prey composition, overcoming problems with conventional prey identification based on degraded or digested remains in stomach contents (Pompanon et al. 2012). Here, utilizing reliable primers for fish, we apply NGS in the analysis of stomach contents of opportunistically collected dead Yangtze finless porpoises, thereby expanding the limited knowledge of diet of this critically endangered species…