The ocean was a significant part of my childhood. Growing up on the southern coast of Sicily, I came to appreciate its wonders first through activities like sailing, windsurfing, and surfing. Later, in university, I studied marine biology.
As technology advances, so do our tools for studying the ocean and its organisms. I’m particularly interested in using unoccupied aerial vehicles (UAV) and machine learning to address challenging, unanswered questions about marine mammals. My goal is to develop new techniques that help us better understand their behavior and monitor their health.
My PhD project aims to measure the body condition of wild Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin in Shark Bay, Western Australia, using images captured by drones. By converting pixels into meters, I plan to input these measurements into a basic 3D model of a dolphin’s body. This will allow me to estimate a dolphin’s body weight based on the volume obtained from the model.
The first part of my project involves validating drone measurements by comparing them to measurements taken by hand. The second part focuses on using body weights as a proxy to understand the costs of mating among the dolphins in Shark Bay. In this population, males consort females in a coercive manner and compete with other males for access to females. Although this mating behavior is believed to be costly for both sexes, there have been no formal studies quantifying these costs. In my project, I plan to monitor the body condition and overall health of females and males during the mating season, measuring possible changes in their condition. I hope to shed light on the underexplored aspects of bio-energetics within the context of the mating system of this dolphin population, while also contributing to the utilization of new technology in monitoring the health of wild marine mammals.
