Corrigendum to: Heavy with child? Pregnancy status and stable isotope ratios as determined from biopsies of humpback whales.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/conphys/cow050.].

Heavy with child? Pregnancy status and stable isotope ratios as determined from biopsies of humpback whales.

Understanding reproductive rates of wild animal populations is crucially important for management and conservation. Assessing pregnancy status of free-ranging cetaceans has historically been difficult; however, recent advances in analytical techniques have allowed the diagnosis of pregnancy from small samples of blubber tissue. The primary objectives of this study were as follows: (i) to test the efficacy of blubber progesterone assays as a tool for diagnosing pregnancy in humpback whales (); (ii) to estimate the pregnancy rate of humpback whales in Monterey Bay, California; and (iii) to investigate the relationship between stable isotopes and reproductive status of these whales.

Blubber cortisol: a potential tool for assessing stress response in free-ranging dolphins without effects due to sampling.

When paired with dart biopsying, quantifying cortisol in blubber tissue may provide an index of relative stress levels (i.e., activation of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis) in free-ranging cetacean populations while minimizing the effects of the act of sampling.