Understanding the diet of a species is vital for comprehending trophic interactions and implementing appropriate ecosystem-based fisheries management measures. Without dietary information, changes in predator-prey interactions and food web dynamics can go unmonitored, resulting in poor management decisions due to erroneous assumptions.

Despite the clear need for dietary data, studies describing these interactions are often lacking.

The most common method used to interpret a species’ diet is stomach content analysis; this is a straightforward way of obtaining a snapshot of recently consumed prey. Another increasingly common method is analysis of prey DNA, which allows for the identification of highly digested prey.