A bioenergetics model to evaluate demographic consequences of disturbance in marine mammals applied to gray whales

By S. Villegas‐Amtmann, L. Schwarz, J. Sumich, Daniel P. Costa. 2015

95 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While sophisticated tools are used to monitor behavioral changes of large marine vertebrates, determining whether these changes are meaningful for management and conservation is challenging. The Population Consequences of Disturbance model proposed a bioenergetics model to detect biologically meaningful population responses, where disturbance costs are linked to lost energy. The model assumes that changes in behavior, caused by disturbance, compromise maternal condition, reducing energy delivery to offspring, leading to reduced reproduction, increased offspring mortality, and eventually increased adult mortality. Given its coastal habits and past whaling history, gray whales' (Eschrichtius robustus) life history and ecology are better known than for many other baleen whales. However, their preference for coastal habitat increases their exposure to human disturbance. We created a female gray whale bioenergetics model to determine energy requirements for a two-year reproductive cycle and determined the cons...

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Atmospheric Science, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e866b84fc79973957e37a92f3f0010ae0fb53794