Abstract
Analysis of animal morphometrics can provide vital information regarding population dynamics, structure, and body condition of cetaceans. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become the primary tool to collect morphometric measurements on whales, whereas on free ranging small dolphins, have not yet been applied. This study assesses the feasibility of obtaining reliable body morphometrics from Australian snubfin (Orcaella heinsohni) and humpback dolphins (Sousa sahulensis) using images collected from UAVs. Specifically, using a dolphin replica of known size, we tested the effect of the altitude of the UAV and the position of the animal within the image frame on the accuracy of length estimates. Using linear mixed models, we further assessed the precision of the total length estimates of humpback and snubfin dolphins. The precision of length estimates on the replica increased by ~2% when images were sampled at 45–60 m compared with 15–30 m. However, the precision of total length estimates on dolphins was significantly influenced only by the degree of arch and edge certainty. Overall, we obtained total length estimates with a precision of ~3% and consistent with published data. This study demonstrates the reliability of using UAV based images to obtain morphometrics of small dolphin species, such as snubfin and humpback dolphins.
Highlights
Anthropogenic disturbances can impair an animal’s ability to store energy reserves necessary for survival or reproduction
The aim of this study is to assess the feasibility of obtaining reliable body morphometric measurements of snubfin and humpback dolphins from aerial images recorded using Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
This study focused on snubfin and humpback dolphins in the Fitzroy River
Summary
Anthropogenic disturbances can impair an animal’s ability to store energy reserves necessary for survival or reproduction This may induce changes to the health and fitness of individuals and influence the long-term population viability [1,2]. Morphometric data on cetaceans have been primarily collected through direct measurements of dead specimens from whaling [7,8], bycatch [9], and strandings [10,11,12] or live individuals in captivity [13,14] or more rarely collected for capture-release studies [15] These approaches have provided important morphological information for taxonomic revisions, whereas, except for few species [8,11,16], the sample size is too small for demographic studies at population or species level [2,17]
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