Big Data to study marine fauna
March 9, 2018
An international research team maps the trajectories of 2500 animals from 50 different species to understand how they travel through the ocean.
Understanding the mechanisms that govern the movement of marine animals is essential to facilitate their conservation. An international team of researchers from Australia, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and the Institute of Interdisciplinary Physics and Complex Systems (IFISC, UIB-CSIC) among others, has published a study in PNAS in which they analyzed the geolocation data of more than 2500 animals from 50 different species. Sharks, whales, turtles, sea birds or polar bears are some of the marine species studied, ranging from the poles to the tropics, in order to understand the fundamental mechanisms of their movement and how they adapt their behavior to the human impact on their environment. To obtain this data, datasets have been collected from individual animal mobility studies using geolocation devices over three decades.
As a result of the analysis of the characteristics that best explain the differences between the movements of the different animals, it has been discovered that species and habitat are the most influential. In particular, looking at habitat, the behaviors studied are divided into three categories. The first category includes those trajectories that have low affinity to the coast and move through open ocean making few changes of direction, as is the case of seabirds. In contrast, mixed trajectories are those that are used to being near the coast but that sometimes make incursions into the open sea, such as sea lions. Finally, there are those animals that have a high affinity to the coast and move in a complex way, with many direction changes following the shape of the coast, this being the case of manatees.
The great diversity of animals studied allows to obtain interesting results, as movement patterns are independent of the body size of the animal and its evolutionary history. For example, the movement patterns of a whale are associated with characteristics comparable to those of a seabird (corresponding to the category of low coastal affinity).
This work is a first step towards a global analysis of animal behavior, since it includes a large number of species of marine mega-fauna from around the globe.
Ana Sequeira et al. Convergence of marine megafauna movement patterns in coastal and open oceans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1716137115
