Marine Mammal Health Assessment system (MMHA) using a cross-modal approach
Abstract
Quantifying and predicting the effects of naval activities and other anthropogenic pressures on marine life continues to be challenging for Navy as top predators such as marine mammals are highly mobile and complex systems to study. While past effort has focused on teh acute effects of naval activities, recently there has been greater emphasis on non-lethal and cumulative stressors that could have population level effects on a given species, e.g. the Population Consequences of Disturbance (PCoD) framework. For healthy populations, a stable age distribution is generally assumed. It follows that deviances from a stable age distribution would signify an unhealthy population. Several methods exist to assess the health of populations and include using aerial photogrammetry to quantify body condition and population age structure or tissue sampling which provides information on reproductive and stress hormones as well as insight into nutritional state and inflammation. Despite the increasing use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs; drones) to assess body condition of free-ranging cetaceans, the routine measurement of blubber hormones and the capacity to examine blubber quality from biopsy samples, these methodologies have yet to be combined into an integrated system. This project proposes to combine these two methods into one system that will use a multi-dimensional approach to obtain marine mammal health assessment (MMHA) of cetaceans. Vertical images of animals will be obtained using UAVs. Images will be analyzed to obtain overall estimates of body condition and volumetric measurements to estimate the energetic storage capacity of individual animals. The system will also include a remote biopsy sampling kit as well as the analysis toolbox to analyze blubber hormones, total blubber lipid and protein content and blubber histology metrics. The system is based on the need to obtain more information on the link between age class/body condition, hormones associated with stress physiology and metrics of blubber quality. The MMHA system will provide valuable information to quantify stress within age classes that could have larger effects on a population and can be used in disturbance models such as the PCoD framework and other predictive tools.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Aug 20, 2019
- Source ID
- N000141912612
Entities
People
- Lars Bejder
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of Hawaiʻi System