WWF “Protecting Blue Corridors” report

Our new “Protecting Blue Corridors” report visualises the satellite tracks of over 1000 migratory whales worldwide. Infographic: WWF.

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I was among the lead authors of a new WWF report entitled “Protecting Blue Corridors: Challenges and solutions for migratory whales navigating national and international seas”.

“Protecting Blue Corridors” visualises the satellite tracks of over 1000 migratory whales worldwide. The report outlines how whales are encountering multiple and growing threats in their critical ocean habitats – areas where they feed, mate, give birth, and nurse their young – and along their migration superhighways, or “blue corridors”.

“Protecting Blue Corridors” provides the first comprehensive look at whale migrations and the threats they face across all oceans, highlighting how the cumulative impacts from industrial fishing, ship strikes, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change are creating hazardous journeys.

The report is a collaborative analysis of 30 years of scientific data contributed by more than 50 research groups, with scientists from Oregon State University Marine Mammal Institute, University of California Santa Cruz, University of Southampton (myself) and many others.

“Protecting Blue Corridors” calls for a new conservation approach to address these mounting threats and safeguard whales, through enhanced cooperation from local to regional to international levels. Using infographics and regional case studies, we highlight examples such as how IUCN Important Marine Mammal Areas (IMMAs) can help inform marine connectivity conservation efforts – including for upcoming negotiations of a new treaty for the high seas (Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction) in March 2022 at the United Nations.

Read more about the report:
https://wwfwhales.org/news-stories/protecting-blue-corridors-report

Habitat model forecasts suggest potential redistribution of marine predators in the southern Indian Ocean

A Subantarctic fur seal at Marion Island, southern Indian Ocean. Photograph: Ryan Reisinger.

Our new paper ‘Habitat model forecasts suggest potential redistribution of marine predators in the southern Indian Ocean‘, has been published in the journal Diversity and Distributions.

The journal also featured our paper on its cover.

An adult male southern elephant seal (Mirounga leonina) at Marion Island, southern Indian Ocean. Photograph: Ryan Reisinger.

The was financially supported by the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) through a SANCOR fellowship (94916 to Ryan Reisinger) and a SANAP grant (SNA2005060800001 to Pierre Pistorius), by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) through a fellowship to Ryan Reisinger and by WWF-UK. The work was facilitated by the activities of the SCAR Retrospective Analysis of Antarctic Tracking Data project, funded by the synthesis centre CESAB of the French Foundation for Research on Biodiversity (FRB) and by a meeting of the expert group on “Pelagic spatial planning of the sub-Antarctic areas of Planning Domains 4, 5 and 6,” financially supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Amanda Lombard was supported by the NRF’s South African Research Chair Initiative.

Combining regional habitat selection models for large-scale prediction: Circumpolar habitat selection of Southern Ocean humpback whales

Our new paper entitled “Combining Regional Habitat Selection Models for Large-Scale
Prediction: Circumpolar Habitat Selection of Southern Ocean Humpback Whales” is out now in the journal Remote Sensing. The paper is Open Access, freely available on the publisher’s website:

Reisinger RR, Friedlaender AS, Zerbini AN, Palacios DM, Andrews-Goff V, Dalla Rosa L, Double M, Findlay K, Garrigue C, How J, Jenner C, Jenner M-N, Mate B, Rosenbaum HC, Seakamela SM, Constantine R (2021)
Combining Regional Habitat Selection Models for Large-Scale Prediction: Circumpolar Habitat Selection of Southern Ocean Humpback Whales.
Remote Sensing 13(11): 2074
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13112074

Additionally, the code supporting the paper is available at:
https://github.com/ryanreisinger/megaPrediction

We are grateful to the International Whaling Commission Southern Ocean Research Partnership for funding the work and the International Whaling Commission for providing survey, sighting, and whaling catch data. We thank our colleagues involved in collecting the telemetry data.

Foraging behaviour and habitat-use drives niche segregation in sibling seabird species

Our new paper, entitled “Foraging behaviour and habitat-use drives niche segregation in sibling seabird species” has been published in Royal Society Open Science. The paper is open-access, freely available from the journal’s website:

Reisinger RR, Carpenter-Kling T, Connan M, Cherel Y, Pistorius PA. 2020 Foraging behaviour and habitat-use drives niche segregation in sibling seabird species. Royal Society Open Science 7: 200649.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.200649

Additionally, the data and analysis scripts are available; links are in the paper.

For funding, we are grateful to the South African National Research Foundation (South African National Antarctic Program grant no. SNA93071 to Pierre Pistorius and South African Network for Coastal and Oceanic Research grant no. 94916 to Ryan Reisinger).

The Retrospective Analysis of Antarctic Tracking Data: Individual Tracks Over a Julian Year

 

My colleagues and I recently published a paper in which we used one of the world’s largest collated animal tracking datasets to identify Areas of Ecological Significance in the Southern Ocean. We wrote a short overview of the paper in a blog post for the Nature Ecology and Evolution community.

Here I visualised the individual animal tracks from the Retrospective Analysis of Antarctic Tracking Data project (https://github.com/SCAR/RAATD). The freely available dataset contains tracking data for more than 4,000 individuals of 17 Southern Ocean marine predator species. The tracks are displayed over a Julian year. Each set of points, linked by a line, shows the locations of an animal on a given day of the year and the preceding day. The large black points show where each tracking tag was deployed.

Read more in the papers:
Hindell, Reisinger, Ropert-Coudert, et al. (2020) Nature 580: 87–92. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2126-y
Ropert-Coudert, Van de Putte, Reisinger, et al. (2020) Scientific Data 7:94. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-0406-x

Important Marine Mammal Areas in the Southern Ocean

A Weddell seal (Leptonychotes weddellii) at King George Island, South Shetland Islands. © Ryan Reisinger

I took part in the fourth Important Marine Mammal Areas meeting, at which we proposed 15 candidate Important Marine Mammal Areas in the extended Southern Ocean. You can read more about the workshop here:
https://www.marinemammalhabitat.org/fourth-important-marine-mammal-areas-workshop-adds-15-candidate-immas-for-the-southern-ocean-and-subantarctic-islands/

Polar Expo Poster at Polar2018

 

I have a poster up in the SCAR / IASC expo at Polar2018.

You can download the poster here and read the paper mentioned in the poster (Reisinger et al. 2018, Diversity and Distributions) here.

Thanks again to SCAR for the Fellowship which supported this work, and to the South African National Research Foundation (SANCOR Fellowship) and the Centre de Synthèse et d’Analyse sur la Biodiversité de la Fondation pour la Recherche sur la Biodiversité.

It’s in the Whiskers: Investigating the Diet of Southern Elephant Seals Using Vibrissal Regrowths

A recently-weaned southern elephant seal gets some rest on Marion Island, Southern Ocean, before its first trip to sea.

In a research paper led by Nico Lübcker, we used stable isotope analysis of carbon and nitrogen to show that crustaceans likely form an important component of the diet of southern elephant juveniles.

Low trophic level diet of juvenile southern elephant seals Mirounga leonina from Marion Island: a stable isotope investigation using vibrissal regrowths
Nico Lübcker, Ryan R. Reisinger, W. Chris Oosthuizen, P. J. Nico de Bruyn, André van Tonder, Pierre A. Pistorius, Marthán N. Bester
Marine Ecology Progress Series 577:237-250
https://doi.org/10.3354/meps12240

‘Islands to remember’ in ‘Go!’ and ‘Weg!’

A few of Chris Oosthuizen’s and my photos from Marion Island are the in the July 2017 issue of Go! magazine / Weg! tydskrif.

 

At-sea distribution and habitat use in king penguins at sub-Antarctic Marion Island

Map of the tracks of 15 adult king penguins from Marion Island in 2008 (purple) and 2013 (blue). Ryan Reisinger.

In our new study in Ecology and Evolution, we tracked 15 king penguins from Marion Island to uncover their at-sea distribution and habitat use. Interestingly, individuals by and large headed out against the prevailing Antarctic Circumpolar Current, foraging to the west and southwest of Marion Island. On average, individuals ventured a maximum distance of 1,600 km from the colony, with three individuals foraging close to, or beyond, 3,500 km west of the colony.

Read more about our findings:
Pistorius PA, Hindell MA, Crawford RJM, Makhado AB, Dyer B, Reisinger RR
At-sea distribution and habitat use in king penguins at sub-Antarctic Marion Island (2017) Ecology and Evolution 7(11): 3894–3903.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.2833