Conversely, apparent mortality rates to age 1+ (range: 0.34–0.52) and 2+ (range: 0.15–0.59) were higher than values reported elsewhere. Target Selective Inhibitor high throughput screening The high apparent calf mortality in conjunction with a decline in local abundance, highlight the vulnerability of bottlenose dolphins in the Bay of Islands. Long-term studies are required to understand the causes of high calf mortality and the decline in local abundance. Meanwhile, management should focus on minimizing sources of anthropogenic disturbance and enforcing compliance with current legislation. “
“Increased terrestrial pup mortality
in small colonies due to harassment by subadult males has been proposed as a mechanism to explain the stagnation of South American sea lion populations after sealing ended. To test this hypothesis, pup survival rate was assessed in five northern Patagonia colonies with different sizes. Female diet quality as well as pup growth rate and immune status from the largest and smallest of these colonies BAY 57-1293 purchase were also assessed. Results indicated that the pup survival rate increased with colony size and pup-to-subadult male ratio. Furthermore, pups grew faster in the smallest colony, although female diet composition and pup immune status did not differ between the two colonies. Inverse relationship between pup growth rate and survival rate indicated that mortality
was independent of food supply. In absence of terrestrial predators,
infanticide by subadult males is the only mortality source other than starvation and illness and the relationship between pup survival rate and pup-to-subadult male ratio approached a type II functional response curve. Thus, infanticide stands as the most likely reason for the observed positive relationship between colony size and pup survival rate, supporting the hypothesis that post-sealing population stasis was caused by inverse density dependence. “
“Molecular phylogenetic analyses conducted over the past 15 yr have consistently had difficulties resolving relationships among the cetacean species in the subfamily Delphininae. In addition, paraphyly of the genera Tursiops and Stenella in these molecular phylogenies has been a recurrent problem since the first appearance of such a phylogeny in 1999, suggesting that these genera do not accurately reflect MCE公司 the evolutionary relationships of the species they contain. Morphological analyses have not resolved the issues. The genera in Delphininae originated in the 19th Century on questionable morphological grounds. The species were nearly all originally described in the genus Delphinus of Linnaeus. Recent molecular phylogenies based on various mitochondrial and nuclear DNA markers have suggested a wide range of possible relationships among these taxa, and several authors have suggested synonymizing all the taxa (Lagenodelphis, Stenella, Sousa, and Tursiops) under Delphinus.