Fish Diets in the Gulf of Mexico
A probabalistic representation of fish diet compositions from multiple data sources: A Gulf of Mexico case study
Ecosystem models can be extremely useful tools for ocean resource managers to determine how commercial fisheries can respond to a specific management strategy. C-IMAGE researchers out of the University of South Florida with colleagues from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission looked at fish diet for two non-commercially relevant species in the Gulf of Mexico to produce Maximum Liklihood Estimates (MLEs). MLEs describe how much a specific prey item constitutes a predator’s diet. These values are used to produce a food web diagram that is ultimately used to fine tune the Atlantis ecosystem model.
