Exploring Marine Mammal Cognition as a Conservation Tool

Cognition is an animal's real-time adaptation system for responding to change. Rapid environmental change, often anthropo- genic, is expanding the range and severity of challenges confronting wild animals. Effective conservation requires a multifaceted approach that includes animals' capacities. Large-brained, long-lived animals such as marine mammals often have extensive ca- pability to adaptively modify their behavior due to their cognition, which comprises the mechanisms of information acquisition, processing, and flexible action. Consequently, current behavior need not be a final predictor of future behavior for these animals. This flexibility provides an underutilized and under examined point of leverage for humans interested in improving life out- comes for wild animals. In this team-written, interdisciplinary paper, we argue that application of cognitive approaches may fa- cilitate many conservation efforts directed toward marine mammals. Starting with a workshop on this topic at the 24th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals, scientists representing a wide range of disciplinary expertise addressed eight dif- ferent conservation concerns for six marine mammal species and provided potential cognitive explanations of and interventions.