cephalopod (F,C): 23 (62%); fish, cephalopod, crustacean (F,C;K): 4 (11%), and fish and 

 crustacean (F,K): 1 (3%) (Table 1). Altogether, 46 species offish (19 of which could not be 

 identified) distributed in 11 families, and 3 species of cephalopods and 2 species of 

 crustaceans were identified (Table 2). Six prey species occurred in more than 50% of the 

 stomachs: the Atlantic croaker (Micropogonias undulatus), silver perch (Bairdiella chrysoura), 

 brief squid (LoUiguncula brevis), sand seatrout (Cynoscion arenarius), and a unidentified 

 teleost, and accounted for 57% of all prey taken. The family Sciaenidae was the most 

 important fish family, accounting for 64% of all fish prey. Cephalopods of the family 

 Loliginidae dominated this category, numbering 914 of the 915 specimens found. Shrimp of 

 the genus Penaeus comprised 58 of the 59 crustaceans identified in all stomachs. 



A comparison of these results with the study of Barros and Odell (1990) (Table 3) 

 indicates that bottlenose dolphins in this study did not differ significantly in their food habits. 

 Thus, the wet weight of the stomach contents, an indicator of stomach fullness, was not 

 statistically different in both studies (p>0.05, t-test; data subjected to a natural logarithm 

 transformation to comply with normality and homoscedasticity of variances), the same being 

 true for the number of prey items and prey taxa in each stomach (p>0.05, t-test). In 

 addition, the categories of prey types (fish, cephalopod, crustacean) were also present in 

 similar proportions (p>0.05, chi-square test) in the two studies. Four out of the six most 

 important prey (M. undulatus, C. arenarius, B. chrysoura, and L. brevis), numerically and in 

 terms of frequency of occurrence, were the same in 1986-87 and 1990. 



Although there are differences in the two data sets (samples analyzed in Barros and 

 Odell (1990) were collected during a 2-year period (1986-87), and only from dolphins 

 stranded in the vicinity of Galveston; samples from the present study were collected from 

 dolphins stranded along the entire coast of Texas during early 1990), the results obtained 

 in the present study show that bottlenose dolphins stranded during the 1990 Gulf of Mexico 

 mortality event had a similar prey spectrum as in years of no unusual mortality. These 

 results, although preliminary, suggest that the food habits of these dolphins were not 

 significantly altered during the mortality event. 



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