The potential of wildfowl to consume a large proportion of the available Zostera biomass has been noted elsewhere. The feeding patterns of wildfowl can be heavily modified by shooting disturbance (Madsen, 1988), and this may therefore have an indirect effect on the exposure of Zostera beds to grazing pressure. Recent experiments in Denmark (Madsen, 1988, 1995) showed that reducing shooting disturbance could significantly increase the numbers of wildfowl using a site and grazing on the Zostera resources.

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