Dear Marmam, My co-authors and I are pleased to announce our recent paper on the diving behaviour of North Atlantic right whales in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Wright AJ, Gabaldon J, Zhang D, Hamilton P (2024) Bimodal vertical distribution of right whales Eubalaena glacialis in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Endang Species Res 54:155-166. https://doi.org/10.3354/esr01330 ABSTRACT: Critically endangered North Atlantic right whales Eubalaena glacialis have recently shifted their summer distribution from the Bay of Fundy to the Gulf of St. Lawrence (GSL), Canada. Entanglement in fishing gear and vessel strikes remain the main lethal threats. Foraging on deep aggregations of Calanus prey in the Bay of Fundy involves stereotyped deep ‘flat-bottom’ (U-shaped) dives, while foraging on sub-surface Calanus aggregations on the winter feeding grounds of Cape Cod Bay involves surface feeding. To explore North Atlantic right whale feeding behaviour in the GSL, 5 acoustic and biologging tags (DTAGs) were deployed using suction cups in 2019 and 2020. One whale knocked off the tag after 14 min. Diving behaviour of the other 4 whales with 2.0 to 4.7 h of data was mostly split between flat-bottom foraging dives at, or very close to, the sea floor, and near-surface activities, including logging, respirations, and potentially also sleeping. This biphasic vertical distribution not only places the whales at risk of being hit by vessels, but it may also put them at risk of coming into contact with groundlines used in various fishing industries in the GSL. Although additional research is needed as this limited dataset was restricted to hours of daylight, these results provide new information about right whale behaviour in the GSL that can help inform management actions to reduce human impacts on this endangered species. It is open access and available here: https://www.int-res.com/abstracts/esr/v54/p155-166/ If you have any questions, please feel free to email me: marineb...@gmail.com. Apologies for cross-posting. Andrew -- Andrew Wright, Ph.D. VaquitaAreBrowncoats: Where Sci-Fi meets Science, the Cosmos meets Conservation and Firefly meets Flipper. Shiny https://www.facebook.com/vaquitaarebrowncoats. "We don't have to save the world. The world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about is whether or not the world we live in will be capable of sustaining us in it." Douglas Adams GNU Terry Pratchett
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