Immune Activity, Body Condition and Human-Associated Environmental Impacts in a Wild Marine Mammal

Immune Activity, Body Condition and Human-Associated Environmental Impacts in a Wild Marine Mammal

Within individuals, immunity may compete with other life history traits for resources, such as energy and protein, and the damage caused by immunopathology can sometimes outweigh the protective benefits that immune responses confer. However, our understanding of the costs of immunity in the wild and how they relate to the myriad energetic demands on free-ranging organisms is limited. The endang...

Collapse of a Marine Mammal Species Driven by Human Impacts

Understanding historical roles of species in ecosystems can be crucial for assessing long term human impacts on environments, providing context for management or restoration objectives, and making conservation evaluations of species status. In most cases limited historical abundance data impedes quantitative investigations, but harvested species may have long-term data accessible from hunting r...

Age-Related Declines and Disease-Associated Variation in Immune Cell Telomere Length in a Wild Mammal

Immunosenescence, the deterioration of immune system capability with age, may play a key role in mediating age-related declines in whole-organism performance, but the mechanisms that underpin immunosenescence are poorly understood. Biomedical research on humans and laboratory models has documented age and disease related declines in the telomere lengths of leukocytes ('immune cells'), stimulati...

Marine mammal auditory system noise impacts: evidence and incidence.

Sound is an inevitable element of every human activity in the oceans. Some, like exploration and military sonar exercises, produce impulse sounds that are intense but infrequent; others, like shipping, generate non-impulsive, less intense, but continuous noise. A recent National Research Council review (2003) found that the ocean's acoustic budget has increased by 3 dB, i.e., doubled, per decad...

Human pathogens in marine mammal meat