Data from: Epidemiological models to control the spread of information in marine mammals

Socially transmitted wildlife behaviors that create human-wildlife conflict are an emerging problem for conservation efforts that also provide a unique opportunity to apply principles of infectious disease control to wildlife management. As an example, California sea lions (Zalophus californianus) have learned to exploit concentrations of migratory adult salmonids below the fish ladders at Bonneville Dam impeding endangered salmonid recovery. Proliferation of this foraging behavior in the sea lion population has resulted in a controversial culling program of individual sea lions at the dam, but the impact of such culling remains unclear. To evaluate the effectiveness of current and alternative culling strategies, we used network-based diffusion analysis on a long-term dataset to demonstrate that social transmission is implicated in the increase in dam foraging behavior and then studied different culling strategies within an epidemiological model of the behavioral transmission data. We show that current levels of lethal control have substantially reduced the rate of social transmission, but failed to effectively reduce overall sea lion recruitment. Implementation of culling efforts earlier could have substantially reduced the extent of behavioral transmission and, ultimately, resulted in fewer animals being culled. Epidemiological analyses offer a promising tool to understand and control socially transmissible behaviors.