Submitted to the Department of Biology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Biological Oceanography at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
June 2006Energy intake of individuals affects growth of organisms and, therefore, populations.
Persistent lipophilic toxicants acquired with the energy can bioaccumulate
and harm individuals. Marine mammals are particularly vulnerable because of their
large energy requirements, and transfer of energy and toxicants from mothers to their
young during gestation and lactation. Dynamic energy budget (DEB) models for energy
assimilation and utilization, coupled with pharmacokinetic models that calculate
distribution of toxicants in individuals, can help investigate the vulnerability.
In this dissertation I develop the first individual DEB model tailored specifically
to marine mammals and couple it to a pharmacokinetic model for lipophilic toxicants.
I adapt the individual model to the right whale and use it to analyze consequences of
energy availability on individual growth, reproduction, bioaccumulation, and transfer
of toxicants between generations.
From the coupled model, I create an individual-based model (IBM) of a marine
mammal population. I use it to investigate how interactions of food availability,
exposure to toxicants, and maternal transfer of toxicants affect populations. I also
present a method to create matrix population models from a general DEB model to
alleviate some of the drawbacks of the IBM approach.This work has been supported by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the
US National Science foundation (DEB-9973518 and OCE-0083976), the US
Environmental Protection Agency (R-82908901-0), the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NAO 3NMF4720491) and the WHOI/MIT Joint Program
in Oceanography
