Modelling the Short-Term Movements of Grey Seals between Breeding Colonies and their Long-Term Population Consequences

The requirement to model within-year grey seal movement between breeding colonies in a biologically realistic and computationally manageable way has led to the development of the framework presented here. We attain biological realism by modelling behavioural attributes of the animals (such as site-fidelity and philopatry) and computational expediency by solving the model at equilibrium, hence, directly obtaining a yearly, redistribution function. We present preliminary results on the long-term population consequences of this model.