Identifying predictive relationships for daily lactation costs in marine mammals
Abstract
The ability to acquire significant energy to support reproduction is critical to the maintenance of healthy marine populations. ThePopulation Consequences of Disturbance (PCoD) framework was developed with the intent of quantifying how disturbances that impact individual marine mammals translate to population-level effects. Implementation of this framework often focuses on how disturbances impact energy gains and expenditure, with a particular focus on reproductive females given the importance of this group in driving population dynamics. Not only do lactation costs comprise a significant proportion of the energy expenditure of reproductive females, but they also can be an influential parameter on PCoD model output and were recently identified as a key unanswered question in the application of bioenergetic models in marine mammal management. The existence of empirical data on lactation costs are unevenly quantified across marine mammal taxonomic groups and species, with a particular gap for cetaceans, which are the focus of many PCoD efforts. The objective of this project is to develop predictive relationships to estimate daily lactation costs of marine mammals using existing empirically derived milk intake data from terrestrial and marine mammals. Traditional statistical and phylogenetically corrected analyses will be explored to quantify the relationship between milk intake and offspring body mass within and among species and taxonomic groups, with the inclusion of covariates such as maternal body mass, milk composition, and sample time with respect to lactation duration. Not only will such predictive relationships provide an additional method for quantifying lactation costs in marine mammal PCoD models and other bioenergetic applications, particularly for cetaceans, but comparisons with existing approaches will allow for a better understanding of variation in estimates using methodologies, which can help inform sensitivity analyses for PCoD models.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- May 15, 2023
- Source ID
- N000142312492
Entities
People
- Elizabeth A McHuron
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of Washington