Summer foraging habitat suitability for highly mobile male beluga whales in the Eastern Beaufort Sea and Arctic Archipelago
2025
Luke Storrie | Nigel E. Hussey | Shannon A. MacPhee | Greg O'Corry-Crowe | Lisa L. Loseto
Eastern Beaufort Sea belugas face threats from increasing vessel traffic and decreasing availability of Arctic cod driven by climate change. This necessitates an improved understanding of the environmental drivers of their foraging habitat suitability to make predictions on the consequences of climate change and to inform management decisions. We incorporated animal behaviour into habitat suitability models through comparing the locations of dives associated with foraging with randomly selected locations to quantify summer habitat preferences. We tested whether environmental drivers associated with foraging dives varied between months (July/August) and years (2018/2019). Seafloor depth (350–750 m) was the most important variable determining foraging habitat suitability and was consistent between years. Studies on beluga diet alongside these results suggest that foraging habitat suitability is primarily driven by the presence of Arctic cod. Belugas consistently targeted bathymetric regimes irrespective of ice conditions, suggesting that sites in the Beaufort Sea and Arctic Archipelago may maintain suitable foraging habitat under near-future changes in sea ice. As vessel traffic is predicted to increase in these regions as seasonal sea ice declines, these results can be incorporated into management decisions to identify areas of conservation interest to mitigate possible acoustic threats to beluga whales.
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