Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Whole mammal'

Marine mammals are in a precarious conservation position because of anthropogenic impacts and historic perceptions that they are a consumable commodity. In light of changing abiotic conditions, further evaluation is needed on the habitat use, behavior, and interactions among marine mammals. Conservation legislation has helped protect species, but the greatest ground swelling may be the advent of the commercial whale watching industry. The feeding grounds in Alaskan waters have made this area a prime tourism location, and these nutrient-rich waters have resulted in a confluence of marine mammal species, including the appealing and abundant humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) that may associate with three ecotypes of killer whales (Orcinus orca). These species are interesting because they may travel together to feed on prey or be adversaries in a predator-prey relationship. Using whale watching as a platform, this study evaluated the effects of the presence of these two species separately and together, and of the type of interaction between them, on human perception. Data were collected via opportunistic observations and a retrospective pre- and post-survey instrument. Differences in humpback whale distribution and group size patterns were found relative to killer whale occurrence, although humpback whale behavioral states were unchanged. Changes in passenger conservation attitudes could not be attributed to species and behaviors but they were important determinates to whale watching satisfaction. Overall, more positive conservation attitudes and an increase in knowledge about marine mammals were reported after whale watching. These tours provide an opportunity for collecting meaningful scientific data and providing more in-depth education such as enhancing the appreciation for ecosystem services provided by marine mammals.

Mastitis, the inflammation of the mammary gland by bacterial infection, is one of the costliest diseases to the dairy industry primarily due to a loss in milk production. The aim of this study was to investigate the mechanisms underlying reduced milk production during mastitis. We hypothesized that bacterial endotoxin induces cell apoptosis, oxidative stress and increases hypoxia while inhibiting milk gene expression in the mammary gland. To test this hypothesis, mice were bred to pregnancy, and 3 days post-partum the left and right sides of the 4th pair of mammary glands were alternately injected with either the endotoxin liposaccharide (LPS, E. coli 055:B5, 100 ul of 0.2 mg/ml) or sterile PBS through the teat meatus. At 10.5 and 22.5 h post-injection, pimonidazole HCl, a hypoxyprobe, was injected intraperitoneally. At 12 or 24 h after the LPS injection, the fourth glands were individually collected (n=8 pairs) and analyzed for hypoxia, gene expression and oxidative stress. LPS treatment induced mammary gland inflammation as shown by increases in inflammatory cytokine expression (P < 0.001) and neutrophil recruitment at 12 and 24 h. LPS promoted cell apoptosis in a transient manner; an abundance of cleaved caspase 3 was evident only at 12 h after LPS challenge (P = 0.02). Increased H2O2 content was seen at 12 h (P < 0.001) but decreased dramatically after 24 h of LPS treatment (P < 0.001). Total antioxidative capacity tended to decrease at both 12 and 24 h (P = 0.067 and 0.061, respectively). In agreement with these findings, LPS activated Nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2) antioxidative signaling in the mammary gland, demonstrated by increased expression of its target gene Nqo1 at 12 h (P = 0.05) and xCT at 24 h (P = 0.076). Hypoxyprobe staining, indicative of hypoxia, was greater in the alveoli of PBS-treated glands than LPS-treated glands at both 12 and 24 h. This suggests oxygen tension rises in response to LPS treatment. Conversely, milk expression genes, β-casein gene (CSN2) and α-lactalbumin (LALBA), were inhibited by LPS treatment across time. Expression of α-S1 casein (CSN1S1) mRNA increased with LPS treatment at 24 h, but protein expression was reduced at this same time point (P < 0.05). In summary, intramammary LPS challenge incurs inflammation, augments cell apoptosis, induces oxidative stress and activation of the Nrf2 antioxidation pathway, increases oxygen tension, and inhibits milk protein expression in the mammary gland. This study provides functional insight into mechanisms of reduced milk production during mastitis and provides possible approaches to combat reduction in milk production, such as enhancing the Nrf2-antioxidative signaling pathway and reducing inhibition of milk protein expression.

Marine mammal mass strandings have been documented for centuries, even going as far back as Aristotle. For just as long, the causes of these mass strandings have been questioned. With every species of cetacean known to have stranded, it is important to find trends to understand and prevent these strandings from occurring. With a heightened awareness of this issue, leading to the creation of marine mammal stranding networks throughout the United States in the 1990s, a more comprehensive approach to data collection has helped with the study. Issues such as seasonality, weather, topography, and disease have all been observed as a potential cause of these events. This study attempted to look at the Atlantic Coast of the United States, and its documented mass strandings from 1997-2011. Stranding data taken from the Northeast and Southeast US Marine Mammal stranding network database provided a basis for the study of these mass strandings. Many of the possible causes of these strandings, including seasonality, location, and species were studied. There was some correlation found between seasons and stranding, meaning there are certain times of the year when a cetacean pod may be more likely to strand.

The site fidelity of humpback and southern right whales in Algoa Bay was investigated as a baseline study to examine the importance of this area for the future conservation of these species. An absence of whales since the 1980’s from Algoa Bay and more frequent sightings of southern right and humpback whales during a survey conducted between 2008 and 2011 in Algoa Bay led to the present photo-identification study. Data were collected from boat-based surveys along the coastline in 2015 and 2016 and data from a previous boat-based study during 2008-2011 assessing the occurrence of all cetaceans in Algoa Bay were added. A cumulative number of 96 individual southern right whales and 184 individual humpback whales were identified from callosity patterns and dorsal fins, respectively, over this period in Algoa Bay. A low resighting rate for both species was observed within (6.25 for southern right whales & 6.98% for humpback whales) and between years (1.04% for southern right whales & 9.24% for humpback whales) with mainly individual adult humpback whales being resighted. In contrast, all southern right whale resightings were confirmed to be mother-calf pair individuals. The timing of monthly sightings and resightings of mother-calf pair individuals in the bay may suggest that this area may serve as a fairly new nursery area for southern right whales and as a possible migratory corridor for humpback whales during their migrations to and from their breeding grounds. The sighting distribution within the bay suggest that mother-calf pairs are located closer inshore and further away from the shipping activities on the eastern side of the bay in the proximity of two operational ports. This forms an important baseline for future monitoring to assess the effect of increased shipping activity in the bay on the breeding behaviour of the whales. The site fidelity of humpback and southern right whales in Algoa Bay was investigated as a baseline study to examine the importance of this area for the future conservation of these species. An absence of whales since the 1980’s from Algoa Bay and more frequent sightings of southern right and humpback whales during a survey conducted between 2008 and 2011 in Algoa Bay led to the present photo-identification study. Data were collected from boat-based surveys along the coastline in 2015 and 2016 and data from a previous boat-based study during 2008-2011 assessing the occurrence of all cetaceans in Algoa Bay were added. A cumulative number of 96 individual southern right whales and 184 individual humpback whales were identified from callosity patterns and dorsal fins, respectively, over this period in Algoa Bay. A low resighting rate for both species was observed within (6.25 for southern right whales & 6.98% for humpback whales) and between years (1.04% for southern right whales & 9.24% for humpback whales) with mainly individual adult humpback whales being resighted. In contrast, all southern right whale resightings were confirmed to be mother-calf pair individuals. The timing of monthly sightings and resightings of mother-calf pair individuals in the bay may suggest that this area may serve as a fairly new nursery area for southern right whales and as a possible migratory corridor for humpback whales during their migrations to and from their breeding grounds. The sighting distribution within the bay suggest that mother-calf pairs are located closer inshore and further away from the shipping activities on the eastern side of the bay in the proximity of two operational ports. This forms an important baseline for future monitoring to assess the effect of increased shipping activity in the bay on the breeding behaviour of the whales.

This thesis is offered as a contribution to studies of social and cultural change in the Icelandic fisheries and fishing communities. Such changes may be seen as a result of the interplay of internal dynamics with both national and global forces and processes, not least with regard to the impacts of fisheries governance. These changes occur also in an international context of new environmental ideologies and perceptions of marine mammals, with consequences for social dynamics of local resource-use. Here it is argued that the conflicts over the harvesting or conservation of cetaceans can productively be understood from a cultural perspective. The thesis discusses the elevation of whales as symbols of particular value, and the metaphorical and cognitive aspects of, in particular, anthropomorphism, the projection of human motives and values onto animal behaviour, as a significant and effective part of conservation rhetoric and ideology. Specifically, the thesis deals with issues concerning whaling and whale watching along with issues and debates concerning these alternative forms of exploiting marine mammals. It also discusses central questions regarding fisheries governance and rights to fishing with reference to social and economic viability in Icelandic fishing communities. The unifying themes of this thesis are: how marine-mammal issues and controversies and social impacts of fisheries governance form part of globalization processes; how environmental and economic paradigms influence change, particularly in terms of marine-mammal conservation campaigns and market liberalist resource policy; and how these external ideological forces call for responses at local and national levels. The adaptive actions of the human agents and communities involved are described as creative, cumulative and complex. The thesis also highlights the central transformative role of the new regime of private property rights introduced into Icelandic fisheries governance in the 1980s.

When Marineland of the Pacific opened in 1954 on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in greater Los Angeles, it was the second oceanarium in the world and the first on the West Coast. An initial investment of $3 million by Oceanarium Inc., owners of the popular Marine Studios park located near St. Augustine, Florida, ensured that Marineland was built with the same state of the art facilities needed to produce an authentic representation of the ocean floor on land. Building on Marine Studios' success exhibiting bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), Marineland's central draw was its performing cetaceans. During the park's early years, its collectors pioneered the capture of Pacific dolphin species, such as the Common dolphin (Delphinus delphis) and the Pacific white-sided dolphin (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens), the short-finned pilot whale (Globicephala macrorhynchus), and were the first to capture a live killer whale (Orcinus orca) in 1961. By exposing audiences to previously unknown species through circus-like performances, Marineland played a central role in changing public perceptions of small cetaceans in the post-World War II era. However, with few prior studies to consult, Marineland curators experimented with their own methods of capture, husbandry, and veterinary care that often resulted in the harm or death of cetaceans under their care. Caretakers contended with animal aggression and sexual behavior, the refusal of animals to perform in show routines, and high mortality. Despite the difficulties posed by exhibiting cetaceans, advertisements, press interviews, and films advanced a contrary narrative that animals under Marineland's care enjoyed the conditions of captivity and performing for an audience. This thesis explores the tension between entertainment and animal care that defined the early years of cetacean captivity in North America.

碩士
國立中山大學
中國文學系研究所
106
This study will explore the records of whales from Chinese literature, and classify them according to their historical materials. Conducting a study of the whale culture using the " Circuit of Culture " approach of cultural studies. First, focus on the whale appearance, haunting and economic value. Then, through the image description of the whales by the ancients, sum up the interpretation meaning of the whale in literature, and the cause of the formation of the legend. Second, examine the aborigines in eastern Taiwan, What are the implications of the whale legends, and there are many versions of the biography. Thirdly, the research of Zheng ChengGong, who is known as the " Whale of East Sea ", and the literati of the Qing Dynasty and the Japanese colonial period, commented on the viewpoint of "poetry". Finally, I will discuss the modern "whale" culture writing in Taiwan, and divide it into three types: "realistic observation", "stream of consciousness" and "backtracking and profiling ".

The growing industry of whale-watching is allowing increasing numbers of people access to whales in their natural environment, and constitutes a non-consumptive use of the whales compared to whaling. At the same time, questions are often raised about the hidden effects of whale-watching on the whales. A population of gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) which spends the summer feeding in Clayoquot Sound, on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, is regularly observed by whale-watchers from the nearby tourist centre of Tofino. Concern among whale-watching business operators and tourists about the possible effects of whale-watching on the feeding whales was heightened in the years preceding this study by an apparent northward movement of the whales, taking them farther from the Tofino, the point of departure for whale-watching tours. This study attempts to explain this apparent trend by finding out whether the whales' short-term behaviour is affected by the presence of whale-watching vessels, and by examining their short and long-term behaviour in the wider context of some of the features of their environment. Whales were observed from a small research vessel for three feeding seasons, in five locations within the area known as Clayoquot Sound. The whales' ventilations were recorded continuously and their location and the number of whale-watching vessels present was recorded at regular intervals. The whales' benthic prey was sampled in all three seasons and their planktonic prey in 1995. A series of variables were calculated from the ventilation data and compared to the number of vessels. The whales' dive behaviour was correlated much more strongly with feeding location than with vessel number. Even with these two factors taken into account, much of the variation in their behaviour remains unaccounted for. Because of this, although the behavioural change in the presence of vessels is statistically significant, there is reason to doubt whether it is biologically significant. The effects of feeding location are probably a composite of the effects of depth, prey type and other factors which are difficult to measure. Of the two main components, prey type appears to have a greater effect than depth on gray whale behaviour. Interaction exists between the effects of site and those of whale-watch vessels, meaning that the effects of vessels are different at different sites. The general pattern is that the effects of vessel presence are more pronounced in shallow sites than in deep, although there are some exceptions to this trend. Gray whale prey shows considerable variation in location, density and composition from year to year. The long-term patterns of gray whale habitat use more closely resemble a prey-selection-driven pattern than a pattern of avoidance of whale-watch vessels. The relatively small influence of vessel numbers on gray whale feeding behaviour suggests that the current guidelines in place for whale-watching vessels are effective in limiting disturbance of the whales. The variable nature of their prey supply suggests that gray whales use all the sites in Clayoquot Sound, and that the availability of a diverse selection of prey is necessary for their success in the tertiary feeding grounds.
Graduate

Compliance is a key feature for the management of non-consumptive wildlife viewing, as it can link management measures to performance and aid in developing recommendations that promote sustainable practices. Whale watching is a prominent wildlife viewing industry that is steadily rising in demand around the world. Managing vessel-cetacean encounters and operator behaviour (both commercial and recreational) is key to limiting impacts on cetaceans, yet the scale of regulatory compliance is often poor or unknown. Although efforts exist to regulate whale watching, challenges arise for the assessment of compliance in marine environments, as they are inherently spatially vast, lack physical boundaries, and can involve mobile stressors (i.e. vessels) and species. Chapter 1 reviews the shift in paradigms from consumptive to non-consumptive activities and highlights challenges for those tasked with managing the growing wildlife tourism industry, and in particular, whale watching. After reviewing a suite of measures prevalent around the world, this chapter then focuses on the Salish Sea’s approach to managing whale watching. This area epitomizes a major whale watching hub and displays complex, multi-jurisdictional and constantly evolving measures. Due to a lack of knowledge in this region, Chapter 2 shifts from theory to practice and assesses regulatory compliance with marine mammal distance regulations from 2018 to 2019 in the Salish Sea. Although compliance was nearly 80%, key drivers including vessel and species type were found to significantly influence non-compliance. Recreational vessels were non-compliant 41.9% of the time and 74.2% of non-compliant encounters occurred around killer whales across both years. The findings of the study demonstrate that case-specific investigation of compliance is necessary as each region is unique in its approach to management. Lastly, recommendations are proposed that can benefit marine managers and policymakers to enhance the performance of measures and subsequently minimize risk to cetaceans.
Graduate

Locomotion in any environment requires the use of energy to overcome the physical

forces inherent in the environment. Most large marine vertebrates have evolved

streamlined fusiform body shapes to minimize the resistive force of drag when in

a neutral position, but nearly all behaviors result in some increase in that force.

Too much energy devoted to locomotion may reduce the available surplus necessary

for population-level factors such as reproduction. The population of North Atlantic

right whales has not recovered following legal protection due to decreased fecundity,

including an increase in the intercalf interval, an increase in the years to first calf and

an increase in the number of nulliparous females in the population. This reproductive

impairment appears to be related to deficiencies in storing enough energy to meet the

costs of reproduction. The goal of this study was to determine whether increases in

moving between prey patches at the cost of decreased foraging opportunities could

shift these whales into a situation of negative energy gain. The first step is to

understand the locomotor costs for this species for the key behaviors of traveling and

foraging.

This study investigated the cost of locomotion in right whales by recording the

submerged diving behaviors of free-ranging individuals in both their foraging habitat

in the Bay of Fundy and their calving grounds in the South Atlantic Bight with a

suction-cupped archival tag. The data from the tags were used to quantify the oc-

currence of different behaviors and their associated swimming behaviors and explore

three behavioral strategies that reduce locomotor costs. First, the influence that

changes in blubber thickness has on the buoyancy of these whales was investigated

by comparing the descent and ascent glide durations of individual whales with differ-

ent blubber thicknesses. Next, the depth of surface dives made by animals of different

sizes was related to the depth where additional wave drag is generated. Finally, the

use of intermittent locomotion during foraging was investigated to understand how

much energy is saved by using this gait. The final piece in this study was to deter-

mine the drag related to traveling and foraging behaviors from glides recorded by

the tags and from two different numerical simulations of flow around whales. One, a

custom developed algorithm for multiphase flow, was used to determine the relative

drag, while a second commercial package was used to determine the absolute mag-

nitude of the drag force on the simplest model, the traveling animal. The resulting

drag estimates were then used in a series of theoretical models that estimated the

energetic profit remaining after shifts in the occurrence of traveling and searching

behaviors.

The diving behavior of right whales can be classified into three stereotyped be-

haviors that are characterized by differences in the time spent in different parts of the

water column. The time budgets and swimming movements during these behaviors

matched those in other species, enabling the dive shapes to be classified as foraging,

searching and traveling behaviors. Right whales with thicker blubber layers were

found to perform longer ascent glides and shorter descent glides than those with

thinner blubber layers, consistent with the hypothesis that positive buoyancy does

influence their vertical diving behavior. During horizontal traveling, whales made

shallow dives to depths that were slightly deeper than those that would cause ad-

ditional costs due to wave drag. These dives appear to allow whales to both avoid

the costs of diving as well as the costs of swimming near the surface. Next, whales

were found to glide for 12% of the bottom phases of their foraging dives, and the

use of `stroke-glide' swimming did not prolong foraging duration from that used by

continuous swimmers. Drag coefficients estimated from these glides had an average

of 0.014 during foraging dives and 0.0052 during traveling, values which fall in the

range of those reported for other marine mammals. One numerical simulation deter-

mined drag forces to be comparable, while the other drastically underestimated the

drag of all behaviors. Finally, alterations to the behavioral budgets of these animals

demonstrated their cost of locomotion constitutes a small portion (8-12%) of the

total energy consumed and only extreme increases in traveling time could result in a

negative energy balance. In summary, these results show that locomotor costs are no

more expensive in this species than those of other cetaceans and that when removed

from all the other stressors on this population, these whales are not on an energetic

`knife edge'.

Dissertation