Animal-borne telemetry: An integral component of the ocean observing toolkit

Animal telemetry is a powerful tool for observing marine animals and the physical environments that they inhabit, from coastal and continental shelf ecosystems to polar seas and open oceans. Satellite-linked biologgers and networks of acoustic receivers allow animals to be reliably monitored over scales of tens of meters to thousands of kilometers, giving insight into their habitat use, home range size, the phenology of migratory patterns and the biotic and abiotic factors that drive their distributions. Furthermore, physical environmental variables can be collected using animals as autonomous sampling platforms, increasing spatial and temporal coverage of global oceanographic observation systems. The use of animal telemetry, therefore, has the capacity to provide measures from a suite of essential ocean variables (EOVs) for improved monitoring of Earth's oceans. Here we outline the design features of animal telemetry systems, describe current applications and their benefits and challenges, and discuss future directions. We describe new analytical techniques that improve our ability to not only quantify animal movements but to also provide a powerful framework for comparative studies across taxa. We discuss the application of animal telemetry and its capacity to collect biotic and abiotic data, how the data collected can be incorporated into ocean observing systems, and the role these data can play in improved ocean management

PROTECTIVE AREAS FOR INTERNESTING GREEN TURTLE (CHELONIA MYDAS) POPULATI0NS IN THAILAND

Southeast Asia Sea Turtle Associative ResearchBangkok, Thailand, 16-19 December 2002Distribution pattern during internesting period of green turtles (Chelonia mydas) nested at two major nesting grounds in Thailand (Huyong Island, Andaman Sea and Khram Island, the Gulf of Thailand) were analyzed. The distribution data were obtained from the Platform Transmitter Terminals (PTTs) attached to the 19 nesting green turtles during 2000-2002. The result showed that during 2-4 months internesting period, 95% of the observed locations distributed within 6 km from the shore lines of both the nesting Islands. This indicates that the present 3-km protected boundary is not sufficient to conserve nesting green turtle populations during internesting periods. The author suggested extending of additional 3-km protected boundary to guarantee the survival of nesting green turtle populations in Thailand

Geographical range and speciation in fossil and living molluscs.

The notion of a positive relation between geographical range and speciation rate or speciation probability may go back to Darwin, but a negative relation between these parameters is equally plausible. Here, we test these alternatives in fossil and living molluscan taxa. Late Cretaceous gastropod genera exhibit a strong negative relation between the geographical ranges of constituent species and speciation rate per species per million years; this result is robust to sampling biases against small-bodied taxa and is not attributable to phylogenetic effects. They also exhibit weak inverse or non-significant relations between geographical range and (i) the total number of species produced over the 18 million year timeframe, and (ii) the number of species in a single timeplane. Sister-group comparisons using extant molluscan species also show a non-significant relation between median geographical range and species richness of genera. These results support the view that the factors promoting broad geographical ranges also tend to damp speciation rates. They also demonstrate that a strong inverse relation between per-species speciation rate and geographical range need not be reflected in analyses conducted within a single timeplane, underscoring the inadequacy of treating net speciation as a proxy for raw per-taxon rates