Local Seal or Imported Meat? Sustainability Evaluation of Food Choices in Greenland, Based on Life Cycle Assessment.

Achieving a sustainable global food chain is becoming particularly acute as modern Western diets are adopted in a growing number of countries and cultures around the world. Understanding the consequences that this shift has on health and sustainability is important. This exploratory study is the first to apply the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology to analyze the sustainability implication of ongoing dietary shifts in Greenland, where locally hunted seal meat is increasingly being replaced by imported livestock products, primarily pig and poultry produced in Denmark. This dietary shift, indirectly driven by international trade bans such as the EU seal product ban, has sustainability implications. To inform and support more comprehensive analyses and policy discussions, this paper explores the sustainability of these parallel Greenlandic food supply chains. A quantitative comparison of the greenhouse gas emissions of Greenlandic hunted seal and Danish pig and poultry is complemented by a qualitative discussion of nutrition, cultural food preferences, animal welfare, and the use of land, pesticides and antibiotics. Although the variability in the life cycle inventory data collected from Greenlandic hunters was considerable, greenhouse gas emissions of seal meat were consistently lower than those of imported livestock products. Emissions of the latter are dominated by biogenic emissions from feed production and manure management, while these are absent for seal meat, whose emissions instead are dominated by fossil fuel use. The implications of these results for sustainable national food policies in a modern global context as well as important areas for additional research are discussed.

Haematology and clinical blood chemistry in harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) from the inner Danish waters.

Harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) in the Baltic Sea are under increasing pressure from anthropogenic activities, which affect the overall health of populations. Individuals' haematologic and biochemistry parameters are known to be linked to a population's health status and are therefore useful tools for cross-population comparisons and to assess health patterns of a population through time. However, it is often difficult to acquire data representing the full range of values and assess the influence of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Here, we present the range of haematology and blood chemistry values obtained from 46 wild (n = 54 blood samples) individuals incidentally caught in pound-nets and five porpoises in long-term human care (n = 449 blood samples) from an outdoor semi-open facility in Denmark. Although it was not possible to formally test the differences between samples from free-ranging and captive individuals, lymphocyte values were lower for free-ranging animals whereas eosinophils and white blood cell values were higher in captive individuals. Aspartate aminotransferase and alanin aminotransferase values were also lower for captive individuals compared to free-ranging ones. Age group did not influence any of the blood parameters tested for free-ranging individuals. Sodium values were higher for males compared to females. Values were higher and lower in the fall for platelets and lactic acid dehydrogenase, respectively, compared to the other seasons. Based on samples yielded by individuals in long-term human care, haemoglobin, mean cell volume, white blood cells, absolute lymphocyte count, and alkaline phosphatase values were all influenced by health status based on clinical examination. These are therefore candidate parameters to assess health status of wild porpoises. Our results underline that it is essential to obtain ranges of reference values for all haematologic and biochemistry markers in order to assess health status of free-ranging individuals. Individuals in human care provide the opportunity to observe biological and ecological determinates (e.g. age, season) of long-term biomarker response patterns and to assess the suite of biomarkers best suited to predict individual health status.

From echolocation clicks to animal density--acoustic sampling of harbor porpoises with static dataloggers.

Monitoring abundance and population trends of small odontocetes is notoriously difficult and labor intensive. There is a need to develop alternative methods to the traditional visual line transect surveys, especially for low density areas. Here, the prospect of obtaining robust density estimates for porpoises by passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is demonstrated by combining rigorous application of methods adapted from distance sampling to PAM. Acoustic dataloggers (T-PODs) were deployed in an area where harbor porpoises concurrently were tracked visually. Probability of detection was estimated in a mark-recapture approach, where a visual sighting constituted a "mark" and a simultaneous acoustic detection a "recapture." As a distance could be assigned to each visual observation, a detection function was estimated. Effective detection radius of T-PODs ranged from 22 to 104 m depending on T-POD type, T-POD sensitivity, train classification settings, and snapshot duration. The T-POD density estimates corresponded to the visual densities derived concurrently for the same period. With more dataloggers, located according to a systematic design, density estimates would be obtainable for a larger area. This provides a method suitable for monitoring in areas with densities too low for visual surveys to be practically feasible, e.g., the endangered harbor porpoise population in the Baltic.