QUANTIFYING THE ECOLOGICAL PROCESSES UNDERLYING COLLISIONS BETWEEN LARGE BALEEN WHALES AND LARGE SHIPS TO EVALUATE RISK

• Main Author: Williams, Sara Halley
• Format: Thesis
• Language: unknown
• Published: University of Montana 2017
• Subjects: baleen whale; baleen whales
• Online Access: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/10985; https://scholarworks.umt.edu/context/etd/article/12038/viewcontent/Williams_umt_0136D_10467.pdf

The marine environment is a major interface for human and wildlife conflict. Humans use the world’s oceans for activities ranging from military operations, tourism and recreation, commercial shipping and transport, and resource extraction. These activities have a variety of impacts on marine wildlife, from alteration of the acoustic environment, displacement, changes to behavior and movement to direct physical injury or death due to collisions with vessels. Increasing awareness of human-associated negative impacts has called for research aimed at understanding the specific effects and consequences of human activity and marine wildlife overlap. Large baleen whales are of particular research, conservation, and management interest. In past centuries, commercial whaling pressures decimated populations worldwide. Recent protection efforts and whaling restrictions have allowed for the recovery of some species, while others have yet to achieve substantial population growth (Magera et al. 013). Often, areas of intense human maritime activity heavily overlap critical large whale habitat, including feeding areas, breeding and calving grounds, and migratory routes (Block et al. 2011, Maxwell et al. 2013). Collisions between ships and whales (‘ship strikes’) have been documented across the globe and across large whale species (Laist et al. 2001, Jensen & Silber 2003, Neilson et al. 2012), and have grown to become one of the primary and most severe world-wide threats to baleen whale conservation (Clapham et al. 1999, Thomas et al. 2016). Substantial research has laid the groundwork for understanding the occurrence, causes, and circumstances surrounding ship strikes (Vanderlaan & Taggert 2007, Vanderlaan et al. 2009, Gende et al. 2011, Gende et al. 2012, van der Hoop et al. 2012, Conn & Silber 2013, Redfern et al. 2013, Bezamat et al. 2014), the probability of and relative risk of ships strikes in specific areas, and the effectiveness of mitigation efforts (van der Hoop et al. 2012, Laist et al. 2014). However, ...