Lutra 59(1-2)_Geelhoed_book review_2016

Eat and be eaten - Porpoise diet studies

Maarten F. Leopold 2015. PhD thesis. Wageningen University, Wageningen, the Netherlands. 239 pp. ISBN 978-94-6257-558-5.

On 20 November 2015 Maarten Frederik (Mardik) Leopold successfully defended his PhD thesis Eat and be eaten. Leopold has been working on diets of fish eating bird species for about half a lifetime. These diet studies were based on the identification of remains of hard parts of prey species in birds’ stomachs, mainly otoliths, the ear bones of fish. In the course of time Leopold built a reference collection that made it possible to use otoliths to not only identify the fish species but also their length and/or mass (Leopold et al. 2001). Two events triggered the genesis of this thesis....