title: Epidemiological models to control the spread of information in marine mammals.
abstract: Socially transmitted wildlife behaviours that create human-wildlife conflict are an emerging problem for conservation efforts, but also provide a unique opportunity to apply principles of infectious disease control to wildlife management. As an example, California sea lions (Zalophus californianus) have learned to exploit concentrations of migratory adult salmonids below the fish ladders at Bonneville Dam, impeding endangered salmonid recovery. Proliferation of this foraging behaviour in the sea lion population has resulted in a controversial culling programme of individual sea lions at the dam, but the impact of such culling remains unclear. To evaluate the effectiveness of current and alternative culling strategies, we used network-based diffusion analysis on a long-term dataset to demonstrate that social transmission is implicated in the increase in dam-foraging behaviour and then studied different culling strategies within an epidemiological model of the behavioural transmission data. We show that current levels of lethal control have substantially reduced the rate of social transmission, but failed to effectively reduce overall sea lion recruitment. Earlier implementation of culling could have substantially reduced the extent of behavioural transmission and, ultimately, resulted in fewer animals being culled. Epidemiological analyses offer a promising tool to understand and control socially transmissible behaviours.
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California Los Angeles, CA 90095-1606, USA zschakner@ucla.edu.
authors.forename: Zachary A
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-8325-3526
authors.initials: ZA
authors.lastname: Schakner
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California Los Angeles, CA 90095-1606, USA Michael.buhnerkempe@gmail.com.|Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
authors.forename: Michael G
authors.initials: MG
authors.lastname: Buhnerkempe
authors.affiliation: Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, 2001 Marine Drive, Room 120, Astoria, OR 97103, USA.
authors.forename: Mathew J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Tennis
authors.affiliation: US Army Corps of Engineers, Fisheries Field Unit, Post Office Box 150, Cascade Locks, OR 97014, USA.
authors.forename: Robert J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Stansell
authors.affiliation: US Army Corps of Engineers, Fisheries Field Unit, Post Office Box 150, Cascade Locks, OR 97014, USA.
authors.forename: Bjorn K
authors.initials: BK
authors.lastname: van der Leeuw
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California Los Angeles, CA 90095-1606, USA.|Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
authors.forename: James O
authors.initials: JO
authors.lastname: Lloyd-Smith
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California Los Angeles, CA 90095-1606, USA.
authors.forename: Daniel T
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-5793-9244
authors.initials: DT
authors.lastname: Blumstein
mesh_terms: D000819:Animal Communication; D000818:Animals; D000835:Animals, Wild; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D005247:Feeding Behavior; D007858:Learning; D046070:Sea Lions / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: culling; human–wildlife conflict; network-based diffusion; salmon conservation; social learning; social transmission