Separating Historical Catches Among Pygmy Blue Whale Populations Using Recent Song Detections

Details

• Journal Title:
  Marine Mammal Science
• Personal Author:
  Branch, Trevor A. ; Monnahan, Cole C. ; Leroy, Emmanuelle C. ; Shabangu, Fannie W. ; Širović, Ana ; Cerchio, Salvatore ; Al Harthi, Suaad ; Allison, Cherry ; Cabrera, Naysa Balcázar ; Gedamke, Jason
• NOAA Program & Office:
  NMFS (National Marine Fisheries Service) ; OST (Office of Science and Technology)
• Description:
  In the Southern Hemisphere and northern Indian Ocean, there are at least five populations of pygmy blue whales, Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda, residing in the Northwest Indian Ocean (NWIO, Oman), central Indian Ocean (CIO, Sri Lanka), Southwest Indian Ocean (SWIO, Madagascar to Subantarctic), Southeast Indian Ocean (SEIO, Australia to Indonesia), and Southwest Pacific Ocean (SWPO, New Zealand). Each population produces a distinctive repeated song, but none have population assessments or reliable measures of historical whaling pressure. Here we created pygmy blue whale catch time series by removing Antarctic blue whale catches using length data and then fitting generalized additive models (based on latitude, longitude, and month) to contemporary song data (largely from 1995 to 2023) to allocate historical catches to the five populations. Most pygmy blue whale catches (97% of 12,207) were taken by Japanese and Soviet operations during 1959/1960 to 1971/1972, with the highest totals taken from the SWIO (6514), SEIO (2593), and CIO (2023), and lower catches from the NWIO (549) and SWPO (528). The resulting predicted annual catch assignments provide the first indication of the magnitude of whaling pressure on each population and are a key step toward assessing the status of these five pygmy blue whale populations.
• Keywords:
  Blue Whale Fish Stock Assessment Blue Whale Fish Stock Assessment Balaenoptera Musculus Indica Generalized Additive Models (GAM) Generalized Linear Model (GLM) Passive Acoustic Monitoring Populations Spatial Models Subspecies Whaling Catch History

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• Source:
  Mar Mam Sci e70003
• DOI:
  https://doi.org/10.1111/mms.70003
• Format:
  PDF
• Document Type:
  Journal Article
• Rights Information:
  Accepted Manuscript
• Rights Statement:
  The NOAA IR provides access to this content under the authority of the government's retained license to distribute publications and data resulting from federal funding. While users may legally access this content, the copyright owners retain rights that govern the reproduction, redistribution, and re-use of this work. The user is solely responsible for complying with applicable copyright law.
• Compliance:
  Submitted
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:e8eb346507831cdf8fa121d0fe654445374e70fec8845df6d4fdace90a4a85b3035b9e78488f57c1e54bb5581dde79501a40bc0c834a8b416585b14f9a910f98
• Download URL:
  https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/67471/noaa_67471_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 3.13 MB ]