Beaked Whale Group Deep Dive Behavior from Passive Acoustic Monitoring
Abstract
Although the causal link between sonar and stranding has not been described explicitly, beaked whales are one of the cetacean taxa more sensitive to use of Navy sonar (Moretti et al., 2014; Tyack et al., 2011). Despite their vulnerability, Blainville's beaked whale, Mesoplodon densirostris (Md), are routinely detected year-round on the AUTEC range, coincident with routine use of Navy sonar. This has led to the suggestion that perhaps whales can become habituated to sonar or at least do not respond in the same way as nave animals (Schorr et al., 2014). Perhaps whales choose to stay in areas of frequent sonar use because the advantages of greater foraging opportunities outperform the disadvantages of sonar exposure. This suggestion makes AUTEC an excellent laboratory to understand not only fundamental aspects of their biology and ecology, but also how and why these whales might be impacted by the use of sonar.We propose to address this question by creating a new post-processing detection, classification and localization method capable of utilizing passive acoustic data from the hydrophone array at AUTEC to track individual clicking beaked whales within group deep dives, and by creating a model relating acoustic footprint statistics (e.g., click detection counts, number of hydrophones detected on, etc.) on hydrophones to group size and parameterize it using surface visual observations. The model will expand upon current automatic group assignment software in Matlab using detection archives from the Marine Mammal Monitoring on Navy Ranges (M3R) system (Jarvis et al., 2014), and will also enable development of a real-time algorithm to estimate and display group size information for support of routine density estimation (e.g., Marques et al., 2009 and Moretti et al., 2010) and other field experiments. These results will be used to create a statistical model of beaked whale group deep dive behavior.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 30, 2015
- Accession Number
- AD1013986
Entities
People
- Charlotte Dunn
- Diane Claridge
- Jessica Shaffer
- Len Thomas
- Paul Baggenstoss
- Tiago A Marques
Organizations
- Naval Undersea Warfare Center