AT A GLANCE Project Information
Project Title: COEXIST-Condition and energy expenditure estimates from free-ranging marine mammals
Project Objective: Using controlled experiments on captive harp seals to develop algorithms for estimating energy expenditure and body condition based on acceleration data. Ultimately, these algorithms will be implemented onboard animal-borne satellite relay data loggers to provide us with a means of tracking these parameters over time in free-ranging seals.
Project Duration and Timing: 3 years (2014-2016)
Project Funding: Norwegian Research Council, NOK 3,169,000
Using these two algorithms, the
researchers will create an instrument that can be attached to seals in the wild that can estimate energy expenditure and body condition. “The harp seal, the species we have been working with, is one of the most important fish predator species in the Arctic ecosystem,” says Biuw. “Various models are currently used to estimate how many fish the population of these seals eat, and these models all have to make assumptions on population size, diet composition of the
seals, and finally
energy consumption. Our new instruments will provide us with valuable new data that can help us improve estimates of how much fish these seals need to sustain themselves. This is useful for Arctic fisheries and seal population management, as it is important that these activities are kept at sustainable levels that do not have
a detrimental impact on other species’ ability to support themselves.” In the near future the researchers
hope to create an improved method of estimating diet composition using cameras and image classification algorithms, similar
to those used for
facial recognition. If an algorithm can be inserted into cameras attached to seals that can reliably identify their prey, the devices will be able to send this information via satellite, since the entire image are too large to be sent via the limited bandwidth available via satellites. This will provide
further
improvements to the methods used to estimate the consumption of
the seal
populations. Eventually, the team hopes to extend the use of their devices to other seal species as well as other marine mammals such as whales.
★
Martin Biuw Senior researcher specialising in the ecology and physiology of marine mammals. He holds a PhD from the University of St Andrews, where he worked helping develop methods for collecting and relaying environmental and physiological data from animal-borne instruments. Most of his work has focused on polar organisms, mainly marine mammals.
Contact: Tel: +4777750316 Email:
Martin.biuw@
akvaplan.niva.no Web:
www.akvaplan.niva.no
Project Partners: Martin Biuw (Coordinator, Akvaplan-niva, Norway), Lars Folkow, Mario Acquarone & Erling Nordøy (Arctic University of Tromsø, Norway), Kjell Nilssen & Tore Haug (Institute of Marine Research, Norway), Patrick Miller & Mike Fedak (University of St Andrews, UK), Katsufumi Sato, Kagari Aoki & Ippei Suzuki (University of Tokyo, Japan), Andreas Fahlman (Texas A&M University, USA)
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