callanhoskins / captive-cetaceans

Investigating the captive cetacean industry in the US

Captive Cetaceans - who are they?

Overview

In the past few years, public attention has focused on the conditions captive cetaceans (orcas, whales, and dolphins) live in. The captive cetacean industry has been in existence since 1938, and has evolved greatly in the years to follow, as amusement parks began to make more and more money from public exhibitions of the animals.

This dataset provides high-level information about all of the acquisitions of cetaceans from the wild between 1938 and 2017 (just counts). It also provides a dataset containing all the information that the author could find on the whales and dolphins captive during this time, with information for each animal including species, name, birthyear, mother, father, transfers, and more. There are 2229 animals represented in the dataset.

The author of the dataset, Amber Thomas, sourced the information from the US National Marine Mammal Inventory and from Ceta-Base. She used the data to write Free Willy and Flipper by the Numbers in which she analyzes the population and acquisition method for captive cetaceans from 1938. She also analyzes captive cetacean breeding rates and life expectancies over the period.

Thanks to Sara for pointing me in the direction of this dataset :)

I will start this project by reproducing Amber Thomas's original analysis. Then, I want to take it a step further by analyzing the quality of life of the cetaceans in the dataset. In which parks / areas do captive cetaceans live the longest? How does a transfer or multiple transfers correlate to an animal's lifespan or breeding history? What types of family trees do we see in the data?

Since the release of Blackfish, many people have awakened to the realization that the captive cetacean industry can be merciless and unhealthy for the animals. I'd like to see if that can be proven / disproven by the data.

Data Challenge

The original author did a really interesting analysis in which she predicted the years when the captive cetacean population would go extinct based on all the data she had accumulated on captive animals' lives. Re-creating that projection (perhaps in conjunction with another question about the animals' lives while they're in captivity) seems like it would make a very interesting challenge for the rest of the team.

Milestones

• Progress Report 1: Ensure that the data is tidy. Re-create Amber Thomas's original analyses (three parts): acquisitions by capture / breeding over time, life expectancy over time for each species of cetacean, (possibly?) projection of cetacean population in the future. Basic but informative plots, with all necessary notes (but nothing formal).

• Progress Report 2: My own analysis: what is life like as a captive cetacean? What are the family dynamics like?

• Challenge for the rest of the team: Complete projection of cetacean population in the future. Write up challenge with at least three questions involving the dataset. Final draft.

• Final report: Beautify all plots I have made for progress reports 1 and 2. Turn my notes into fully-expanded analyses of what I found and assemble all together into the final report.