Dear members of the MARMAM community, On behalf of my coauthors, I'd like to share two recent, open access publications on population drivers and extinction risk in endangered southern resident killer whales.
Nelson, B.W., Ward, E.J., Linden, D.W., Ashe, E. and Williams, R., 2024. Identifying drivers of demographic rates in an at‐risk population of marine mammals using integrated population models. Ecosphere, 15(2), p.e4773. Effective conservation of threatened populations requires identification of the processes limiting recovery. When multiple population processes are potentially limiting, they are sometimes analyzed independently, often using different datasets. Analytically, this is suboptimal, as processes are often correlated, which can lead to biased estimates of parameters and quantities of interest. Integrated population models (IPMs) can synthesize several data streams in the same probabilistic framework to circumvent these issues. Lack of prey was identified as one of the primary threats to recovery of critically endangered southern resident killer whales (SRKWs), Orcinus orca. Previous studies have correlated SRKW demographic rates with indices of Chinook salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha abundance, but these approaches have modeled reproduction and survival independently. We developed an IPM for SRKWs that models both processes simultaneously, as a function of Chinook salmon abundance along the west coast of North America. We used this model to evaluate the relationship between Chinook salmon abundance and demographic rates of SRKWs, with the goal of updating our understanding of a potential causal relationship between prey availability and SRKW population dynamics, and how these relationships may have changed over time. Results suggest that SRKW mortality rates are more strongly associated with Chinook salmon abundance than birth rates. Our analysis also suggests northern resident killer whale abundance could also be affecting SRKW carrying capacity, possibly through competition over shared prey resources. The IPM fit observed total abundance data well and predicted temporal changes in population demographics with reasonable accuracy, but small sample size may have opacified model selection. Our approach offers a valuable tool for predicting the response of the SRKW population to alternative management strategies involving the recovery of Chinook salmon stocks in the eastern Pacific. https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecs2.4773 Williams, R., Lacy, R.C., Ashe, E., Barrett-Lennard, L., Brown, T.M., Gaydos, J.K., Gulland, F., MacDuffee, M., Nelson, B.W., Nielsen, K.A. and Nollens, H., 2024. Warning sign of an accelerating decline in critically endangered killer whales (Orcinus orca). Communications Earth & Environment, 5(1), p.173. Wildlife species and populations are being driven toward extinction by a combination of historic and emerging stressors (e.g., overexploitation, habitat loss, contaminants, climate change), suggesting that we are in the midst of the planet’s sixth mass extinction. The invisible loss of biodiversity before species have been identified and described in scientific literature has been termed, memorably, dark extinction. The critically endangered Southern Resident killer whale (Orcinus orca) population illustrates its contrast, which we term bright extinction; namely the noticeable and documented precipitous decline of a data-rich population toward extinction. Here we use a population viability analysis to test the sensitivity of this killer whale population to variability in age structure, survival rates, and prey-demography functional relationships. Preventing extinction is still possible but will require greater sacrifices on regional ocean use, urban development, and land use practices, than would have been the case had threats been mitigated even a decade earlier. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01327-5 _______________________________________________ MARMAM mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/marmam
