Deep ocean drivers better explain habitat preferences of sperm whales Physeter macrocephalus than beaked whales in the Bay of Biscay.

ABSTRACT: Species Distribution Models are commonly used with surface dynamic environmental variables as proxies for prey distribution to characterise marine top predator habitats. For oceanic species that spend lot of time at depth, surface variables might not be relevant to predict deep-dwelling prey distributions. We hypothesised that descriptors of deep-water layers would better predict the deep-diving cetacean distributions than surface variables. We combined static variables and dynamic variables integrated over different depth classes of the water column into Generalised Additive Models to predict the distribution of sperm whales Physeter macrocephalus and beaked whales Ziphiidae in the Bay of Biscay, eastern North Atlantic. We identified which variables best predicted their distribution. Alth

SUBMITTER: Virgili A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9187681 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature