Relationship between sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) click structure and size derived from videocamera images of a depredating whale (sperm whale prey acquisition)

Abstract

Folkert. Relationship between sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) click structure and size derived from videocamera images of a depredating whale (sperm whale prey acquisition). Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Acoustical Society of America, 2009America, , pp.3444-3453. 10.1121 Relationship between sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) click structure and size derived from videocamera images of a depredating whale (sperm whale prey acquisition) Sperm whales have learned to depredate black cod ͑Anoplopoma fimbria͒ from longline deployments in the Gulf of Alaska. On May 31, 2006, simultaneous acoustic and visual recordings were made of a depredation attempt by a sperm whale at 108 m depth. Because the whale was oriented perpendicularly to the camera as it contacted the longline at a known distance from the camera, the distance from the nose to the hinge of the jaw could be estimated. Allometric relationships obtained from whaling data and skeleton measurements could then be used to estimate both the spermaceti organ length and total length of the animal. An acoustic estimate of animal length was obtained by measuring the inter-pulse interval ͑IPI͒ of clicks detected from the animal and using empirical formulas to convert this interval into a length estimate. Two distinct IPIs were extracted from the clicks, one yielding a length estimate that matches the visually-derived length to within experimental error. However, acoustic estimates of spermaceti organ size, derived from standard sound production theories, are inconsistent with the visual estimates, and the derived size of the junk is smaller than that of the spermaceti organ, in contradiction with known anatomical relationships.

Review of Underwater and In-Air Sounds Emitted by Australian and Antarctic Marine Mammals

“…Sperm whales have been recorded off the US east coast [324][325][326][327][328], off Nova Scotia [329,330], around the Bahamas [331][332][333], around Bermuda [334], in the Caribbean [335][336][337][338][339], in the Gulf of Mexico [340][341][342][343], in Alaska [344][345][346][347][348], in the northeast Pacific [349], off Japan [350,351] around Hawaii [352], at the Galapagos Islands [173,353,354], at the Azores [355], off Scotland [356], off Norway [357][358][359][360][361], in the Mediterranean [362][363][364][365][366], in the South Pacific [367], in New Zealand [368][369]<...>…”

Using a coherent hydrophone array for observing sperm whale range, classification, and shallow-water dive profiles

“…Rectangular window was applied across the array aperture. Mathias et al, 2009;Miller et al, 2013;Teloni et al, 2007). An automated moving local peak energy detector with a 1 ms averaging-time window was applied to the beamformed pressure-time series data to determine the arrival time of each pulse within a sperm whale click signal to estimate the IPI.…”

“…Each click exhibits a multi-pulse structure (Møhl, 2001;Norris and Harvey, 1972;Zimmer et al, 2004) arising from reflections of the acoustic signal generated by the phonic lips off the frontal and distal air sacs bounding the spermaceti organ of a sperm whale. The interpulse interval (IPI) provides a measure of the length of the spermaceti organ that has been shown to be strongly correlated with the size of a sperm whale individual (Antunes et al, 2010;Gordon, 1990;Growcott et al, 2011;Mathias et al, 2009;Miller et al, 2013;Rhinelander and Dawson, 2004;Teloni et al, 2007). Here we show that it is possible to distinguish and classify multiple vocalizing sperm whale individuals located in the far-field of a single, densely sampled, towed horizontal coherent hydrophone array system using the instantaneous sperm whale position estimates in both range and bearing, and the IPIs of the vocalized click signals.…”

Acoustic tracking of sperm whales in the Gulf of Alaska using a two-element vertical array and tags

“…In 2003, the Southeast Alaska Sperm Whale Avoidance Project (SEASWAP) was created to quantify the scale of this depredation in the EGOA and to recommend strategies to reduce it. Passive acoustic monitoring and bioacoustic tagging became important tools for studying sperm whale behavior during natural and depredation foraging behaviors (Thode et al, 2007;Mathias et al, 2009, Mathias et al, 2012. One key aspect of the study has been determining what acoustic cues alert the animals to fishing activity and over what distance these cues are detectable above background noise levels.…”