Hello everyone, On behalf of my coauthors, I am pleased to share our recently published paper titled “Blue whales increase feeding rates at fine-scale ocean features”.
Fahlbusch, J. A., Czapanskiy, M. F., Calambokidis, J., Cade, D. E., Abrahms, B., Hazen, E. L., & Goldbogen, J. A. (2022). Blue whales increase feeding rates at fine-scale ocean features. *Proceedings of the Royal Society B*, 289(1981), 20221180. Abstract: Marine predators face the challenge of reliably finding prey that is patchily distributed in space and time. Predators make movement decisions at multiple spatial and temporal scales, yet we have limited understanding of how habitat selection at multiple scales translates into foraging performance. In the ocean, there is mounting evidence that submesoscale (i.e., <100 km) processes drive the formation of dense prey patches that should hypothetically provide feeding hot spots and increase predator foraging success. Here we integrated environmental remote-sensing with high-resolution animal-borne biologging data to evaluate submesoscale surface current features in relation to the habitat selection and foraging performance of blue whales in the California Current System. Our study revealed a consistent functional relationship in which blue whales disproportionately foraged within dynamic aggregative submesoscale features at both the regional and feeding site scales across seasons, regions, and years. Moreover, we found that blue whale feeding rates increased in areas with stronger aggregative features, suggesting that these features indicate areas of higher prey density. The use of fine-scale, dynamic features by foraging blue whales underscores the need to take these features into account when designating critical habitat and may help inform strategies to mitigate the impacts of human activities for the species. The paper is open access and can be downloaded here: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2022.1180 Code and documentation can be found on my github page: https://github.com/physalus/Blue-Whales-and-Lagrangian-Features A knitted R-Markdown with the analysis and results for this manuscript (including the code to produce them) can be found at: https://physalus.github.io/Blue-Whales-and-Lagrangian-Features/ Please contact me at muscu...@stanford.edu if you have any questions. Best regards, James Fahlbusch PhD Candidate Hopkins Marine Station Stanford University
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