10
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      Are Antarctic minke whales unusually abundant because of 20th century whaling?

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Severe declines in megafauna worldwide illuminate the role of top predators in ecosystem structure. In the Antarctic, the Krill Surplus Hypothesis posits that the killing of more than 2 million large whales led to competitive release for smaller krill-eating species like the Antarctic minke whale. If true, the current size of the Antarctic minke whale population may be unusually high as an indirect result of whaling. Here, we estimate the long-term population size of the Antarctic minke whale prior to whaling by sequencing 11 nuclear genetic markers from 52 modern samples purchased in Japanese meat markets. We use coalescent simulations to explore the potential influence of population substructure and find that even though our samples are drawn from a limited geographic area, our estimate reflects ocean-wide genetic diversity. Using Bayesian estimates of the mutation rate and coalescent-based analyses of genetic diversity across loci, we calculate the long-term population size of the Antarctic minke whale to be 670,000 individuals (95% confidence interval: 374,000-1,150,000). Our estimate of long-term abundance is similar to, or greater than, contemporary abundance estimates, suggesting that managing Antarctic ecosystems under the assumption that Antarctic minke whales are unusually abundant is not warranted.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Mol. Ecol.
          Molecular ecology
          Wiley-Blackwell
          1365-294X
          0962-1083
          Jan 2010
          : 19
          : 2
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Department of Biology, Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford University, Pacific Grove, CA 93950, USA. kruegg@stanford.edu
          Article
          MEC4447
          10.1111/j.1365-294X.2009.04447.x
          20025655
          d540c650-d463-44fc-ac5d-ed6d826a2383
          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article