Fig. 5: Relative nutrient composition of wastes produced by small cetaceans, deep divers and baleen whales.
From: Composition of cetacean communities worldwide shapes their contribution to ocean nutrient cycling
Individual nutrient released per kilogram of food ingested daily was normalized per nutrient and computed for 38 cetacean species, as estimated using a bioenergetic model supplemented with an original dataset of diet composition, prey composition and metabolic data and set up with Monte-Carlo simulations combined with a bootstrap procedure with n = 1e4. For all nutrients except copper (Cu; with our calculated p-value p = 2.2 1e-2 for comparison with small cetaceans) there is no significant difference between the relative composition of each taxon. Boxplots display the median with a solid black line in each box, lower and upper hinges correspond to the 25th and 75th percentile, respectively; upper and lower whiskers extend respectively from the hinges to the largest and lowest values no further than 1.5 times the inter-quartile range, and data beyond the end of whiskers are not plotted. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.
