You are invited to the next edition of the SMM Editor’s Select Webinar Series. This series highlights the latest and most exciting marine mammal science published in the Marine Mammal Science Journal. The SMM created this series to give scientists and citizens around the world a chance to engage with marine mammal scientists, learn, and ask questions. All are welcome!
Join us on Thursday, 21 September 2023 at 1 pm EDT / 6 pm GMT / 7 pm CET
for the next SMM Editors’ Select Series Webinar:
Using drones to investigate the timing of harbour seal pupping, with Dr. Anders Galatius
This event was recorded live and put on youtube: https://youtu.be/3zEoPu8d4ks
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About this talk:
Harbour seal females give birth to their single pup during a distinct pupping season, which occurs during the summer in most areas. To obtain unbiased estimates of the pup production of harbour seals, surveys of seal colonies need to be timed optimally and conducted under sufficiently similar conditions. In the Limfjord, the resident harbour seal population have about 95% of their pups at two haul-outs, Ejerslev Røn and Blinderøn just 3 km apart. The short distance makes this area ideal for investigation with drones. We counted harbour seal pups at these two haul-outs throughout the pupping season in June for three consecutive years, 2017-2019. As harbour seal pups can swim almost from birth, there was considerable variation in the counts. Some of this variation could be related to date; as the season progressed, increasing numbers of pups were hauled out, before the counts began to drop, with an estimated peak in counts on June 22nd. Weather also impacted the counts, on windy days, fewer pups were counted. These findings will be used in the planning and interpretation of harbour seal pup surveys in Denmark.
About the presenter:
Anders Galatius is a senior researcher at Aarhus University’s Department of Ecoscience where he works on marine mammal morphology, ecology and behaviour. He graduated as MSc from University of Copenhagen, Denmark in 2003 and obtained his PhD from the same university in 2009. He has been working at Aarhus University since 2010, leading the Danish seal monitoring programmes of harbour seals and grey seals since 2013.
Open access to this article is made temporarily available in the weeks around the presentation and can be found here. Current SMM members have access to all Marine Mammal Science papers.
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