river cetaceans and habitat change generalist resilience or specialist vulnerability河鲸目动物和栖息地改变多面手韧性或专家的脆弱性.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Marine Biology Volume 2012, Article ID 718935, 11 pages doi:10.1155/2012/718935 Review Article River Cetaceans and Habitat Change: Generalist Resilience or Specialist Vulnerability? Brian D. Smith1 and Randall R. Reeves2 1 Ocean Giants Program, Wildlife Conservation Society, 2300 Southern Boulevard, Bronx, NY 10460, USA 2 Okapi Wildlife Associates, 27 Chandler Lane, Hudson, QC, Canada J0P 1H0 Correspondence should be addressed to Brian D. Smith, bsmith@ Received 5 February 2012; Revised 13 March 2012; Accepted 14 March 2012 Academic Editor: E.C.M. (Chris) Parsons Copyright © 2012 B. D. Smith and R. R. Reeves. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. River dolphins are among the world’s most threatened mammals, and indeed the baiji (Lipotes vexillifer ), a species endemic to China’s Yangtze River, is likely extinct. Exploitation for products such as meat, oil, and skins has been a lesser feature in the population histories of river dolphins compared to most large mammals. Habitat factors are therefore of particular interest and concern. In this paper we attempt to describe the population-level responses of river dolphins to habitat transformation. We find circumstantial but compelling evidence supporting the view that, at a local scale, river dolphins are opportunists (generalists) capable of adapting to a wide range of habitat conditions while, at a river basin scale, they are more appropriately viewed as vulnerable specialists. The same evidence implies that the distributional responses of river dolphins to basinwide ecological change