Review of the National Marine Mammal Laboratories Steller Sea Lion Telemetry Program

This is a review of the National Marine Mammal Laboratory's (NMML) Steller sea lion telemetry program. The scope of the review was to focus on four important aspects of the program: The appropriateness of the programming and deployment strategies; the appropriateness of the methods used to retrieve and manage telemetry data obtained from Service Argos; the appropriateness of the stage-based filtering algorithm used by the NMML; and the determination of whether potential biases and appropriate measures of statistical uncertainty have been included. The NMML telemetry program has been a driving force in the development of satellite telemetry in the past 20 years, and many of the innovations made by this team have been of considerable benefit to the discipline in general. The end point of their research efforts is to provide the best possible information to aid in the conservation and management of this endangered species, and the team is well placed to continue as a leader in the field. After the meeting held with NMML scientists in Seattle June 2-3, 2004, I found that: 1. With respect to Scope Item i (SDR programming and deployment strategies), I felt that the team has done an excellent job developing the appropriate sampling and transmission protocols to be used on the SDRs. However, the devices used in the past have in-built limitations, largely due to the use of " binned " summaries of behavioural data. To date these limitations have not been a problem and the information collected has been sufficient to answer most of the important questions (such as identification of critical habitat). The team will however need to obtain better data on foraging behaviour to address emerging questions of habitat use, and this will require the use of better on-board summaries and data transmission. The deployment strategies used so far have to large extent been driven by the requirement to study juveniles. Access to this age group has been difficult, but adopting the SCUBA capture technique and developing the new " raft traps " has greatly increased the teams ability to conduct properly stratified designs. Another difficulty is the remote location of the seal's haul-outs, particularly in the Gulf of Alaska. However the team, in conjunction with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, has managed to sample a large number of regions. There are now sufficient data to assess the appropriateness of the sample sizes in each region and …