Chapter 16: Vulnerability of marine mammals in the Great Barrier Reef to climate change

Abstract

The marine mammals of the GBR are an ecologically diverse group. They possess some important similarities in terms of life history and basic physiology that make general interpretations of their vulnerability to some impacts appropriate. These similarities are: • they are mammals, and thus air breathing and endothermic, consuming relatively large quantities of food relative to body size in comparison to fishes and invertebrates, and • they are long-lived and slow breeding so are susceptible to low levels of mortality, particularly of breeding adults.

Our focus in this chapter is to relate how climate change impacts, and the flow-on consequences of them, will manifest in changes to habitats and food resources that in turn may affect the marine mammals of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR).