Reconstructing Humpback Whale Populations in the North Atlantic ...

• Main Authors: Smith, Tim D., Reeves, Randall R., Friday, Nancy A., Punt, André E.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: ASC 2002 - L - Theme session 2024
• Subjects: Fisheries and aquaculture; Technologies and data; Humpback Whale; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.17895/ices.pub.25442983.v1; https://ices-library.figshare.com/articles/conference_contribution/Reconstructing_Humpback_Whale_Populations_in_the_North_Atlantic/25442983/1

No abstracts are to be cited without prior reference to the author.Our understanding of changes in populations of cetaceans is often based on fitting single species density-dependent population models to contemporary data. This understanding can be extended by also using historical data. The process of fitting population models to both contemporary and historical data can provide a focus on the history of the population over time periods of multiple life spans, tests of the consistency of the historical and contemporary data, and a test of the structure of the population model. A recent example of an attempt to fit historic and contemporary data for North Atlantic humpback whales is described. A complex spatial model with compensatory and depensatory density-dependence on calf survival was used to integrate historical removal data with contemporary information on population breeding structure, regional abundance, and rates of increase in different feeding grounds. The model was unable to mimic the observed ...