Population ecology questions

Even before the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle was already highly endangered.Of course, the spill did not help. While these turtles are highly migratory, the Gulf of Mexico is one of their favorite habitats.In the summer, female sea turtles return to the beaches where they were hatched to lay their eggs.Females lay eggs every one to three years after the age of 10–12.Turtles lay their eggs on the beach, not in water, so when the young turtles hatch, they must make their way from the beach down to the water. Even in the best of circumstances, there are many predators and many turtles do not make it.The 2010 oil spill in the Gulf not only affected adult turtles, but it also greatly exacerbated the dangers of hatching. Because exposure to oil is often fatal to sea turtles, young turtles that encountered oil on the beach or in the water would have been in great danger.Environmental groups were able to relocate many sea turtle eggs to other beaches, but many eggs remained in the area of the oil spill.On the left is a typical graph for the survivorship curve of a Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, and on the right is what it might look like for the cohort born during the Gulf spill.To help analyze what this means for the future of the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, we have constructed an age pyramid. On the left is a typical age pyramid for Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, and on the right is what it might look like in 2016.Bottlenose dolphins spend much of their time far out to sea, and thus were less likely to come into direct contact with the oil spill. However, dolphins are mammals and must surface to breathe, which brought many dolphins into direct, and often fatal, contact with oil.Another problem for bottlenose dolphins was food scarcity and contaminated prey.Dolphins are carnivores, feeding primarily on fish, shrimp, and squid.The oil from the spill contaminated the dolphins’ food source and caused drops in the numbers of animals they could eat.Bottlenose dolphins are thus facing two different risks from the oil spill: coming into contact with oil through surfacing and food scarcity. Both of these risks will have the effect of limiting the population size.Food scarcity, the second risk, affected the number of dolphins the Gulf of Mexico can support. This number is called the. If the population of dolphins was well below thethe spill, the population would have been


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