Pup Mortality in a Rapidly Declining Harbour Seal (Phoca vitulina) Population
The harbour seal population in Orkney, off the north coast of Scotland, has reduced by 65% between 2001 and 2010. The cause(s) of this decline are unknown but must affect the demographic parameters of the population. Here, satellite telemetry data were used to test the hypothesis that increased pup...
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ftpubmed:oai:pubmedcentral.nih.gov:3842331 2023-05-15T16:33:34+02:00 Pup Mortality in a Rapidly Declining Harbour Seal (Phoca vitulina) Population Hanson, Nora Thompson, Dave Duck, Callan Moss, Simon Lonergan, Mike 2013-11-27 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3842331 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0080727 en eng Public Library of Science http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3842331 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0080727 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. CC-BY Research Article Text 2013 ftpubmed https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0080727 2013-12-08T01:26:57Z The harbour seal population in Orkney, off the north coast of Scotland, has reduced by 65% between 2001 and 2010. The cause(s) of this decline are unknown but must affect the demographic parameters of the population. Here, satellite telemetry data were used to test the hypothesis that increased pup mortality could be a primary driver of the decline in Orkney. Pup mortality and tag failure parameters were estimated from the duration of operation of satellite tags deployed on harbour seal pups from the Orkney population (n = 24) and from another population on the west coast of Scotland (n = 24) where abundance was stable. Survival probabilities from both populations were best represented by a common gamma distribution and were not different from one another, suggesting that increased pup mortality is unlikely to be the primary agent in the Orkney population decline. The estimated probability of surviving to 6 months was 0.390 (95% CI 0.297 – 0.648) and tag failure was represented by a Gaussian distribution, with estimated mean 270 (95% CI = 198 – 288) and s.d. 21 (95% CI = 1 – 66) days. These results suggest that adult survival is the most likely proximate cause of the decline. They also demonstrate a novel technique for attaining age-specific mortality rates from telemetry data. Text harbour seal Phoca vitulina PubMed Central (PMC) PLoS ONE 8 11 e80727 |
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Research Article Hanson, Nora Thompson, Dave Duck, Callan Moss, Simon Lonergan, Mike Pup Mortality in a Rapidly Declining Harbour Seal (Phoca vitulina) Population |
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Research Article |
description |
The harbour seal population in Orkney, off the north coast of Scotland, has reduced by 65% between 2001 and 2010. The cause(s) of this decline are unknown but must affect the demographic parameters of the population. Here, satellite telemetry data were used to test the hypothesis that increased pup mortality could be a primary driver of the decline in Orkney. Pup mortality and tag failure parameters were estimated from the duration of operation of satellite tags deployed on harbour seal pups from the Orkney population (n = 24) and from another population on the west coast of Scotland (n = 24) where abundance was stable. Survival probabilities from both populations were best represented by a common gamma distribution and were not different from one another, suggesting that increased pup mortality is unlikely to be the primary agent in the Orkney population decline. The estimated probability of surviving to 6 months was 0.390 (95% CI 0.297 – 0.648) and tag failure was represented by a Gaussian distribution, with estimated mean 270 (95% CI = 198 – 288) and s.d. 21 (95% CI = 1 – 66) days. These results suggest that adult survival is the most likely proximate cause of the decline. They also demonstrate a novel technique for attaining age-specific mortality rates from telemetry data. |
format |
Text |
author |
Hanson, Nora Thompson, Dave Duck, Callan Moss, Simon Lonergan, Mike |
author_facet |
Hanson, Nora Thompson, Dave Duck, Callan Moss, Simon Lonergan, Mike |
author_sort |
Hanson, Nora |
title |
Pup Mortality in a Rapidly Declining Harbour Seal (Phoca vitulina) Population |
title_short |
Pup Mortality in a Rapidly Declining Harbour Seal (Phoca vitulina) Population |
title_full |
Pup Mortality in a Rapidly Declining Harbour Seal (Phoca vitulina) Population |
title_fullStr |
Pup Mortality in a Rapidly Declining Harbour Seal (Phoca vitulina) Population |
title_full_unstemmed |
Pup Mortality in a Rapidly Declining Harbour Seal (Phoca vitulina) Population |
title_sort |
pup mortality in a rapidly declining harbour seal (phoca vitulina) population |
publisher |
Public Library of Science |
publishDate |
2013 |
url |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3842331 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0080727 |
genre |
harbour seal Phoca vitulina |
genre_facet |
harbour seal Phoca vitulina |
op_relation |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3842331 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0080727 |
op_rights |
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
op_rightsnorm |
CC-BY |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0080727 |
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PLoS ONE |
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8 |
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11 |
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e80727 |
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