The Metabolic Costs of Sound Production in Odontocete Cetaceans
Abstract
Animals often increase the amplitude (the Lombard effect), duration, and/or repetition rate of their acoustic signals as a strategy to help reduce the probability of masking from environmental sounds (NRC 2003). Although accumulating evidence from recent research (Scheifele et al. 2005, Holt et al. 2009, Parks et al. 2010) illustrates that several marine mammal species readily modify the parameters of their acoustic signals to compensate for masking noise, potential energetic costs of such compensation behavior are unknown. To our knowledge, there is no empirical data on the metabolic cost of sound production for any marine mammal species. Given that changes in vocal behavior in response to masking noise has been documented in several species, assessing the biological significance of these effects is paramount but also very difficult given the life histories of marine mammals. The Population Consequences of Acoustic Disturbance (PCAD) model has been proposed as a framework to address this challenging task (NRC 2005). Data on the energetic cost of dolphin vocalization from this study can be used to assess the biological significance of vocal compensation in response to sound exposure and populate transfer function 2 (transfer function between behavior change to life functions immediately affected) in the PCAD model. For the first year of this study (Phase 1), we aim to measure oxygen consumption in two captive bottlenose dolphins during sound production at relatively low to moderate levels and compare the metabolic costs of sound production to resting metabolic rates (RMRs) and metabolic costs of other activities, such as performing surface active behaviors (SABs) and/or swimming. For the second year of this study, we propose to measure oxygen consumption in these individuals while they produce the same type of sounds but at different levels, durations, or repetition rates. These measurements will quantify the potential metabolic cost of vocal compensation.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 30, 2010
- Accession Number
- ADA541831
Entities
People
- Dawn P Noren
- Marla M. Holt
Organizations
- National Marine Fisheries Service