Fitting Models of the Population Consequences of Acoustic Disturbance to Data from Marine Mammal Populations

Abstract

Abstract : The long-term goal is to build an ecological modeling framework that facilitates understanding of the at-sea condition and health of various species of marine mammals. We will use the results from these models to explore and quantify the impact of different types of disturbance (both environmental and anthropogenic) on these species. Modeling will be within a Bayesian framework, which will allow us to fully account for uncertainty in the data, the biological processes, and in model output. Our scientific objectives are to build a statistical framework for understanding the at-sea health of (initially) three species of marine mammals: southern and northern elephant seals, and northern right whales. For elephant seals our goal is to build a hierarchical Bayesian model that provides daily estimates of lipid status, as lipid status of the mother is directly linked to pup survival (McMahon et al. 2000). This model will use the drift dive behavior of elephant seals (Crocker et al. 1997) as the link to the underlying true, yet immeasurable, lipid state. For right whales, our scientific objective is to build a model that provides spatially and temporally explicit estimates of individual health, movement, and survival. The model builds upon some of the ideas from the elephant seal project, but as the photo-identification of individual right whales is the core of the data, the model also includes many ideas concerning mark/recapture from (Clark et al. 2005).