Humpback Whale Ecophysiology and Behavior

Background

After a period of strong recovery following the international moratorium on whaling, humpback whales are now entering into a new and uncertain phase dominated by the effects of human activities and oceanographic anomalies such as El Niño and associated marine heatwave conditions in the North Pacific. As a long-lived, highly mobile species, it is hard to study their population rates directly in time to make effective conservation decisions and we must instead rely on population forecasting models. In order to understand the likely impacts of stressors, we must understand the processes which link stressor exposure to individual and ultimately population health. This is a broad and complex topic encompassing stress, energetic and thermal physiology, reproductive and anti-predator strategy, oceanography, and predator prey interactions at multiple trophic levels. 

This project is part of a Strategic Partnership with the Alaska Whale Foundation, which aims to address these questions by bringing together multiple research methods including drone-based morphometry, biologging tags, agent-based modelling and evolutionary theory. We collect and analyze data from North Pacific humpback whale breeding grounds in Hawaiʻi and feeding grounds in Alaska to understand: 

1. The life history strategies of male and female humpback whales

2. What new identification methods can help us track individuals throughout their lifetimes

3. How oceanographic factors influence the amount and distribution of their prey species

4. How their energy expenditure changes across individuals and time

5. How they respond to threats they perceive from predators and human activities

6. How they may adapt to changes in their ecosystem

We then combine and synthesise these findings to develop agent-based population forecasts for humpback whale populations.