4.7 Article

Sperm whale acoustic abundance and dive behaviour in the western North Atlantic

Journal

SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
Volume 12, Issue 1, Pages -

Publisher

NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-20868-3

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Funding

  1. National Marine Fisheries Service
  2. U.S. Navy N45 Program
  3. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management

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Sperm whales are an ideal species for studying with passive acoustic technology, and using acoustic line transect data can improve abundance estimation and provide population-level insights into their foraging ecology.
Sperm whales are an ideal species to study using passive acoustic technology because they spend the majority of their time underwater and produce echolocation clicks almost continuously while foraging. Passive acoustic line transect data collected between June and August 2016 were used to estimate a depth-corrected acoustic abundance and study the dive behaviour of foraging sperm whales in the western North Atlantic Ocean. 2D localizations (n = 699) were truncated at a slant range of 6500 m and combined with the multipath arrivals of surface reflected echoes to calculate 3D localizations (n = 274). Distance sampling using depth-corrected perpendicular distances resulted in a 10.5% change in the acoustic abundance estimate (2199 whales, CV = 14.6%) compared to uncorrected slant ranges (1969 whales, CV = 14.1%), and a detection function that was a better fit for the data. Sperm whales exhibited multiple foraging strategies, with bottom phases occurring at depths of 400-800, 800-1200, or > 1200 m, accounting for an average 39.2, 49.5, or 44.9% of the total recorded dive time, respectively. These results suggest that estimating 3D localizations using acoustic line transect data improves acoustic abundance estimation and can be used to answer population level questions about foraging ecology.

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