Review of Stress and the Measurement of Stress in Marine Mammals

Abstract

The objectives are to comprehensively review the literature on stress in cetaceans, stress in pinnipeds and stress in other marine mammals, and to devise and present a conceptual framework for considering stress in marine mammals that can be used by marine mammal researchers to consider how animals detect and respond to stressors over short and longer time periods. Summary tables will be prepared to list, for each group of marine mammals, key features of all published papers. Reported values for cortisol concentrations will be summarised in tables with details of sample collection conditions in order to provide readily accessible information on mean values and ranges of measured cortisol concentrations in different situations. This review is related to two projects which include investigations of the measurement of stress via quantification of blubber cortisol concentrations. These projects are "Variability of hormonal stress markers collected from a managed dolphin population" and "Variability of hormonal stress markers and stress responses in a large cross-sectional sample of elephant seals".

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2012
Accession Number
ADA571119

Entities

People

  • John Cockrem

Organizations

  • Massey University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Anatomy
  • Animals
  • Biological Sciences
  • Cells (Biology)
  • Cetaceans
  • Cortisol
  • Eukaryotes
  • Information Operations
  • Literature
  • Mammals
  • Marine Mammals
  • Measurement
  • New Zealand

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Business Analytics
  • Marine Mammal Biology