Research is limited for belugas in both the wild and in the care of humans. To address this lack of knowledge, I created a comprehensive video ethogram of beluga behavior, collected from the beluga population located at Sea World San Antonio.
The purpose of this study was to create an educational tool to train future research observers and to increase public awareness. Video recordings were taken from above water and then imported into video editing software. A total of 103 videos were reviewed, which represented 24 hours 49 minutes of video data. Each video was examined for the best examples of each behavior of interest. Clips of these behaviors were recorded and edited together into a single video paired with a voiceover commentary to explain the clip. The video ethogram comprises 82 percent of the behaviors in the comprehensive ethogram. A total of 268 clips of behaviors are in the video. The full running length of the video ethogram is 1 hour 5 minutes 2.03 seconds. Of all the potential behaviors, 64 percent were found to be frequent and 36 percent were found to be rare. The video portion provides visual examples of the behavior while the voiceover commentary provides explanations.
Due to the lack of a comprehensive ethogram in the literature and time consuming process of training observers, this video ethogram is a necessary and practical addition to the study of belugas.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2011-05-9087 |
| Date | 2011 May 1900 |
| Creators | Campbell, Carolyn Ann |
| Contributors | Vastano, Andrew, Wormuth, John |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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