Male bearded seals use vocal displays to attract females and compete with other males during the mating period, making it possible to monitor breeding populations using passive acoustic monitoring (PAM). This study analysed year-round acoustic data from underwater recorders at three sites with different environmental conditions in Svalbard (Norway). Male bearded seals vocalised for an extended ...

Climate change-induced alterations of aquatic ecosystems, increased water temperature and human activity are substantial stressors to anadromous Arctic charr, and these are all expected to increase in the future. The knowledge of the marine behaviour of anadromous Arctic charr, especially post-smolts, is limited and few studies has described their residency at sea in detail. Therefore, more ...

All over the world, local communities are actively engaging in the management and monitoring of natural resources. The underlying driver of most community-driven efforts goes beyond the direct utilization of natural resources to entail a deeper relation to the place or ecosystem they are managing. Relational values have been suggested as a potential driver of such initiatives, but empirical research ...

Among phocids, the hooded seal has the most extreme lactation period. It lasts, for most pups, four days, making it also the shortest lactation period of any mammal. During the lactation period, there is a high energy transfer, which affects and changes the body of the pup in preparation for the following post-weaning fast period. With regard to the decline of the West Ice population, the main purpose ...

Integrating information about the physiology of individuals and their reproductive performance can be a key aspect in determining the relationships between environmental conditions and demographic parameters, and of the individual variability in these relationships. Telomeres are the protective caps of chromosomes found in eukaryotic cells. They generally shorten in relation to the stressors an ...

Processing of detritus is an important ecosystem function in freshwaters. In rivers and streams, the activity of shredding invertebrates play an important role in processing of coarse-particulate organic matter such as leaf litter. In stream food webs, fish may act as top predators and control activity of consumers such as shredders top down. This top-down effect may be of a directly consumptive nature, ...

Studying baleen whales is challenging and complex, where observation of their habitat, sensory modalities, behavior and physiology, are infrequent and brief. The biochemical and biophysical contribution of mysticetes serve a vital role in maintaining a healthy marine ecosystem, but they are facing anthropogenic threats. Before giving any indications of how these threats affect the baleen whales, it ...

Predation is known to be one of the most important causes of nest failure in ground nesting birds, and many populations are experiencing a decline in breeding success worldwide. Predator abundance are expected to be highest closer to productive areas (i.e. Ecosystem exploitation hypothesis), and vary according to the availability of other prey (i.e. Alternative prey hypothesis). I hypothesized that ...

Stable isotope analysis has been used to examine marine food webs since the 1980s and has become a valuable tool for studying carbon sources and trophic structures in benthic food chains in the Arctic. Prior to the present study, no one has used stabile isotope analysis to test for a difference in the main carbon source or trophic structure along a depth gradient in the Arctic. Carbon sources (pelagic ...

Abstract The Arctic ecosystems and its species are under increased anthropogenic pressure from both climate change and industrial activities. Of special interest is pollution from petrogenic substances, and in particular accidental oil spills, that pose a risk to arctic marine organisms. An oil spill in the Arctic may see crude oil encapsulated into the sea ice and over time leaching to surface ...