Understanding the drivers of population abundance and distribution is fundamental to ecology and key to informing conservation actions, particularly in endangered species like blue whales ( Balaenoptera musculus ). Historically, some Eastern North Pacific blue whales have aggregated in the Gulf of California (GoC) each winter. Using photo‐identification data collected around Loreto Bay from 1984 to 2020, we analyzed 453 sighti...

A core challenge in global change biology is to predict how species will respond to future environmental change and to manage these responses. To make such predictions and management actions robust to novel futures, we need to accurately characterize how organisms experience their environments and the biological mechanisms by which they respond. All organisms are thermodynamically connected to their environments through the ex...

Global warming is affecting the population dynamics and trophic interactions across a wide range of ecosystems and habitats. Translating these real‐time effects into their long‐term consequences remains a challenge. The rapid and extreme warming period that occurred after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) during the Pleistocene–Holocene transition (7–12 thousand years ago) provides an opportunity to gain insights into the long‐te...

Tags have been used to examine migration routes and habitat use of large whales for >40 yr, however, evaluation of tag wound healing has largely been short‐term, anecdotal or generalized. This study developed methods for systematic photographic assessment of long‐term external consequences of tag placement, to determine potential differences in wound healing between species and tag types and thus advise future tagging efforts...

Ecology Letters (2010) 13: 1041–1054 Abstract Two major approaches address the need to predict species distributions in response to environmental changes. Correlative models estimate parameters phenomenologically by relating current distributions to environmental conditions. By contrast, mechanistic models incorporate explicit relationships between environmental conditions and organismal performance, estimated independently of...

A bstract To assess large‐whale stocks following the cessation of land‐based South Georgia whaling in 1965, we report three independent sighting databases: a cruise in 1997, observations from Bird Island (NW of South Georgia) between 1979 and 1998, and mariner sightings between 1992 and 1997. All species were rare, with sightings of southern right whales being the most common event. Two right whales photographed off South Geor...