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Tracked gulls help identify potential zones of interaction between whales and shipping traffic.
Citation
CIMINO, M.A., WELCH, H., SANTORA, J.A., KROODSMA, D., HAZEN, E.L., BOGRAD, S.J., WARZYBOK, P., JAHNCKE, J. & SHAFFER, S.A. 2024. Tracked gulls help identify potential zones of interaction between whales and shipping traffic.. Marine Ornithology 52: 61 - 72
Received 10 May 2023, accepted 28 June 2023
Date Published: 2024/04/15
Date Online: 2024/03/12
Key words: indicator, ship strike, Western Gull, Humpback Whale, AIS, vessels, biologging
Abstract
Seabird-vessel interactions are often studied through the lens of fisheries bycatch, but seabirds encounter many watercraft types. Western Gulls Larus occidentalis breeding on the Farallon Islands (California, USA) have a foraging domain that encompasses both shipping lanes and productive fishing grounds, resulting in ample opportunities for vessel encounters. Previous research showed that these Western Gulls can serve as ecosystem indicators because their foraging behavior is linked to ocean prey conditions, and because their foraging grounds overlap with that of Humpback Whales Megaptera novaeangliae, which can make prey accessible. Because ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear are concerns for whales in this region, we investigated gull-vessel interactions as a proxy for identifying whale ship-strike risk by assessing the geographical overlap between GPS-tracked gulls and vessels using the Automatic Identification System. During 2014-2019, 40% of tracked gulls encountered a vessel, resulting in 85 encounters. Gulls mostly encountered cargo ships and tug/pilot boats, mainly within the shipping lanes (79%). Over 30% of these encounters co-occurred with gull foraging events, and most encounters were situated within shipping lanes (80%). Moreover, most gull foraging events began before the vessel encounters, which appeared to interrupt gull behavior. Interannual variability of encounters was mainly related to gull foraging locations: during years of high oceanic productivity, foraging more frequently occurred at sea rather than nearshore or on land, leading to more encounters with ships. This study builds on work that documented overlap between Humpback Whales and Western Gulls but did not test whether foraging gulls encountered vessels. We found that some vessel encounters coincided with gull foraging events; from that, we suggest that the real-time processing of seabird tracking data could provide additional information on whale distribution (which is more difficult to study) within regions of high ship-strike risk and could be included as another tool for dynamic ocean management.
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