Université de Sherbrooke
Candidat M.Sc.
superviseur(e): Fanie Pelletier
Bordeleau, Xavier
Début: 2023-09-04
Fin: 2025-12-23
Page personnelle

Projet

COMBINING TELEMETRY TOOLS TO ESTIMATE GREY SEAL PUP DISPERSAL AND SURVIVAL
Despite the prominent role of juvenile vital rates in shaping overall population dynamics of mammals, little is known about the first-year survival and dispersal of the recovered Northwest Atlantic grey seal population. In the most recent stock assessment of grey seals in Atlantic Canada, estimating juvenile survival was identified as the variables with the largest source of uncertainty. To date, juvenile survival estimates, for Canadian grey seals, have been based on a mark-resighting program of the Sable Island herd, which requires the recruitment of marked pups to the colony at sexual maturity (4-8 years), hence multiple years of marking followed by large survey efforts a required to obtain accurate information. Alternate/complementary methods to estimate juvenile survival, such as acoustic telemetry technologies, could provide timely information to inform population models and be applied where mark-resighting is not feasible. As such, the overarching objective of my M.Sc. thesis is to improve our understanding on the dispersal and survival of grey seals from the Gulf of Saint-Lawrence and Sable Island herd, during their first year of life, using a combination of satellite and 69 kHz acoustic telemetry. Given that acoustic transmitters can function for over multiple years, it has the potential to provide long-term information on movement patterns and survival. In addition, this cheaper technology would allow substantial increase in sample size compare to GPS tags only, necessary for demographic studies. However, in spite of the many advantages of acoustic telemetry, this technology has rarely been used to study pinniped ecology at 69 kHz – frequency used by Global Acoustic Networks – and no previous studies have assessed its potential impact (due to audible transmissions) on juvenile pinnipeds in the wild. Hence, my secondary M.Sc. objective is to assess the potential impact of 69 kHz acoustic telemetry on the behaviour, dispersal pattern and survival of a juvenile pinniped.

Mots-clés

Grey seals, Telemetry (Acoustic & Satellite), State-space modeling , Survival & Movement Ecology