Unobserved individual and population level impacts of fishing gear entanglements on North Atlantic right whales

Fishing gear entanglements can compromise health and lower survival and reproductive output of wildlife, which can slow population growth or cause population declines. However, entanglements may go unobserved, making it difficult to quantify their effects on individuals’ vital rates and a population’s trajectory. Fishing gear entanglements are a leading cause of death for North Atlantic right whales, Eubalaena glacialis, an endangered species whose population has declined substantially over the last decade. Key sources of observation error have not been addressed when quantifying the effects of entanglement on this species. We formulated a hidden Markov model that integrated 28 years of photo identification records, visual health assessments, entanglement assessments, and hormone assays to estimate body condition dynamics, and entanglement, survival, and reproductive rates of female North Atlantic right whales. The model also accounted for observation errors, including entanglements and..., , , # Unobserved individual and population level impacts of fishing gear entanglements on North Atlantic right whales

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cz8w9gjfn](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cz8w9gjfn)

## Description of the data and file structure

North Atlantic right whale sightings histories, visual health assessments, and entanglement assessments

### Files and variables

#### File: Model\_data\_and\_constants.RData

**Description:** Contains two lists (constants and hormone_data), which are used to fit a hidden Markov model to estimate North Atlantic right whale survival, reproductive, health, and entanglement state dynamics. 

constants contains the following variables:

  nind - number of individual right whales in the dataset

  n.occasions - number of sampling occasions in the time series

  n.prim.per.year - number of sampling occasions within each year

  f.primary - vector; occasion of first sighting for each individual

  f.year - vector; year of first sighting for each indivi...