Cetacean societies in the South Pacific

From BeSTGRID

[edit] Cetacean societies in the South Pacific

Contact

Dr Rochelle Constantine, School of Biological Sciences, tel: +64 (0)9 373-7599 ex 85093, Fax: +64 (0)9 373-7417

Usage

500 GB, FTP, Samba

Project Description

In late 1993 the group began to study the population size, ranging behavior, social associations, genetic relatedness and demographics of whale and dolphin populations. In NZ there are two long-term research projects, 1) the bottle-nose dolphins in north-eastern New Zealand waters and effects of tourism on this population, and 2) Bryde’s whales in the Hauraki Gulf. Both of these projects use photo-ID to track individuals and also molecular markers to understand their population genetics and relatedness.

Since 1995 the team has worked in collaboration with Prof. Scott Baker and the South Pacific Whale Research Consortium. This research focuses on the endangered humpback whales throughout the South Pacific and has concentrated on using capture-recapture methods to determine population size and ranging behavior, molecular markers to understand the genetic relatedness of these recovering populations of whales and acoustics in collaboration with Dr Mike Noad at the University of Queensland. Most of this research relies on collaborations with a number of scientists both in New Zealand and overseas, government agencies, tour operators and non-government organizations.

Underpinning all whale studies is a large database of individual whales and whale groups defined by photographic and genetic identification methods correlated with distribution maps. Such identification methods form part of a global whale database requiring the large file storage capacity of BeSTGRID.