Marine Vertebrate Ecology Lab
Global cetacean isotope database
Stable isotopes provide valuable insights into what whales and dolphins eat, where they forage, and how they use marine ecosystems. However, decades of stable isotope data are currently scattered across hundreds of individual studies, making large-scale comparisons difficult.
In collaboration with Dr Clarissa Teixeira at Oregon State University and researchers around the world, we are developing IsoCet, a comprehensive, open-access database of published stable isotope data for cetaceans. The database brings together carbon and nitrogen isotope values from skin, blubber, muscle, liver and bone samples from whales, dolphins and porpoises, alongside information such as species, sex and age class, sampling location and date, tissue type, and sample processing methods.
Where published studies report only summary values, we are working directly with authors to recover individual-level data and additional metadata where available.
By bringing these data together in a standardised and openly accessible resource, the project will enable researchers to investigate broad patterns in cetacean foraging ecology, habitat use and ecological variation across species, regions and time, while providing a foundation for new global-scale comparative research.