News & Events

Subscribe to email list

Please select the email list(s) to which you wish to subscribe.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Image CAPTCHA

Enter the characters shown in the image.

User menu

You are here

Investigating pilotage as a navigational strategy in Northern Fur Seals (Callorhinus ursinus) during pre-migratory foraging trips

Thursday, May 19, 2022 - 16:00 to 16:30
Shannon Edie, UBC Statistics MSc student
Zoom

To join via Zoom: To join this seminar, please request Zoom connection details from headsec [at] stat.ubc.ca.

Abstract: Research on the navigational strategies of marine mammals often uses long-distance migratory data. However, these cost-intensive, long-term monitoring projects are often limited to small sample sizes. One alternative is to use non-migratory trips, where more animals can be tracked. Using shorter trips to investigate navigational hypotheses also allows for a finer-scale investigation of navigational movement, which can aid in exploring pilotage as a potential navigational strategy.

In this project, I explore the potential use of bathymetric landmarks as navigational landmarks by Northern Fur Seals (NFS) during pre-migratory foraging trips. I isolate transiting-type behavior during pre-migratory foraging trips using hidden Markov models, and then use potential functions – a technique traditionally used to model particle or planetary motion – to model the transiting movement of NFS during pre-migratory foraging trips. I then compare these potential functions to the bathymetry of the region.