Cetaceans occupying coastal habitats are at high risk of impact from anthropogenic sources which can cause direct mortality or affect long‐term health. Monitoring and detecting change require long‐term studies and reliable funding, not always available especially in developing countries. Management and conservation of cetaceans must therefore use precautionary methods that allow assessment from limited data sources to identify risk of, and prevent, species extirpation or extinction. IUCN Red List criteria for regional populations was applied to the population of Indian Ocean humpback dolphins (Sousa plumbea) resident in Menai Bay Conservation Area off the south coast of Zanzibar, East Africa which is subjected to unsustainable entanglement rates in gillnet fisheries and unregulated tourism activities. Photographic identification surveys were conducted in 2015 to generate a new abundance estimate from capture–recapture analysis. Mortality estimates were calculated using available data from 1999 to 2002 and a population viability analysis was conducted based on population, species and genus specific parameters. The 2015 abundance estimate for humpback dolphins was 19 (95% CI 14–25) non‐calf individuals, representing a 63% reduction in abundance since 2002. The population viability analysis baseline scenario predicted chance of extinction at 0.996 (SE 0.002) with the median time to extinction at 36 years. Sensitivity analysis suggested that population recovery would only be possible with a complete prevention of bycatch mortality. The population met the threshold for Critically Endangered for all criteria which could be directly assessed. This conservation assessment highlights the requirement for immediate management action to eliminate bycatch of humpback dolphins to prevent the local extinction of the species.

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is a powerful method to study the occurrence, movement and behavior of echolocating odontocetes (toothed whales) in the wild. However, in areas occupied by more than one species, echolocation clicks need to be classified into species. The present study investigated whether the echolocation clicks produced by small, at-risk, resident sympatric populations of Indian Ocean humpback dolphin (Sousa plumbea) and Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops aduncus) in Menai Bay, Zanzibar, East Africa, could be classified to allow species specific monitoring. Underwater sounds of S. plumbea and T. aduncus groups were recorded using a SoundTrap 202HF in January and June-August 2015. Eight acoustic parameters, i.e.-10 dB duration, peak, centroid, lower-3 and lower-10 dB frequencies, and-3 dB,-10 dB and root-mean-squared bandwidth, were used to describe and compare the two species' echolocation clicks. Statistical analyses showed that S. plumbea clicks had significantly higher peak, centroid, lower-3 and lower-10 dB frequencies compared to T. aduncus, whereas duration and bandwidth parameters were similar for the two species. Random Forest (RF) classifiers were applied to determine parameters that could be used to classify the two species from echolocation clicks and achieved 28.6% and 90.2% correct species classification rates for S. plumbea and T. aduncus, respectively. Both species were classified at a higher rate than expected at random, however the identified classifiers would only be useful for T. aduncus monitoring. The frequency and bandwidth parameters provided most power for species classification. Further study is necessary to identify useful classifiers for S. plumbea. This study represents a first step in acoustic description and classification of S. plumbea and T. aduncus in the western Indian Ocean region, with potential application for future acoustic monitoring of species-specific temporal and spatial occurrence in these sympatric species.

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Odontocetes produce ultrasonic clicks for navigation and foraging. These are commonly categorized as regular or buzz clicks based on the inter-click interval. Buzz clicks are linked to foraging behaviors and may be subdivided into slow buzz clicks for prey chase, and regular buzz clicks for prey capture. This study recorded these three click types produced by white-beaked dolphins (Lagenorhynchus albirostris) off the Northumberland coast, UK. Acoustic parameters, (including duration, centroid frequency, and root-mean-squared bandwidth) were calculated and compared across the three click types. The results showed that the regular clicks had shorter durations and higher frequencies than both the buzz click types. The regular buzz clicks had longer durations, lower frequencies, and narrower bandwidths than the slow buzz clicks.Additionally, regardless of click type, about 30% of the clicks had high-frequency secondary peaks and > 90% of the clicks displayed spectral peak and notch patterns between 20 and 80 kHz. These findings are useful for future quantitative assessment of the echolocation a