Dear colleagues, My co-author Séverine Methion and I are pleased to announce our new publication: Bruno Díaz López & Séverine Methion (2018) Does interspecific competition drive patterns of habitat use and relative density in harbour porpoises? Marine Biology (2018) 165:92. http://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-018-3345-8
ABSTRACT Determining the drivers that are responsible for the fine-scale distribution of cetacean species is fundamental to understand better how they respond to changes in their environment. We utilized information theoretic approach to carry out a compre-hensive investigation of the key environmental and anthropogenic correlates of habitat use and relative density of harbour porpoises. In all, 273 daily boat surveys over a period of 38 months, between April 2014 and November 2017, were spent in the field monitoring 9417 km along the coastal and shelf waters of Northwest Spain. Throughout this period, there were 70 encounters with harbour porpoises and 712 encounters with common bottlenose dolphins. The observed unequal use of available habitat indicates that harbour porpoises present a fine-scale pattern of habitat selection along the study area, which is likely related to the variation in oceanographic variables and human disturbance mainly caused by marine traffic and fisheries. While differences in habitat use between harbour porpoises and bottlenose dolphins were observed, interspecific competition with bottlenose dolphins (as competitive exclusion hypotheses) did not appear to play an important role in the distribution and relative density of harbour porpoises. These findings highlight the importance of considering both environmental and anthropogenic variables in ecological studies, in addition to highlighting the importance of using a multi-species ecology approach in research and conservation management planning. A read-only version of the paper is available here: https://rdcu.be/MItq Please do not hesitate to ask me for any question regarding our study or to request a PDF copy of the article: br...@thebdri.com Bruno Díaz López Ph.D Chief biologist and Director The Bottlenose Dolphin Research Institute BDRI Avenida Beiramar 192, O Grove 36980, Pontevedra, Spain www.thebdri.com 0034 684248552 This email is confidential to the intended recipient(s) and the contents may be legally privileged or contain proprietary and private informations. It is intended solely for the person to whom it is addressed. If you are not an intended recipient, you may not review, copy or distribute this email. If received in error, please notify the sender and delete the message from your system immediately. Please note that neither the Bottlenose Dolphin Research Institute BDRI nor the sender accept any responsibility for any viruses and it is your responsibility to scan the email and the attachments (if any). Thank you for your cooperation. _______________________________________________ MARMAM mailing list MARMAM@lists.uvic.ca https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/marmam
