Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Calls of killer whales, Orcinus orca, were analyzed using computed sound features to classify sound patterns and
identify call similarties. Calls were classified and separated according to the podfamily group within clans identified
previously by John Ford (U. BC) in the Vancouver whale populations. Acoustic characteristics of the same call type from
different individuals were extremely similar, so that discriminating these different sounds was the goal. The WHOI
AcouStat program and associated database systems were used to define numerical statistics for each call, and then, these
were compared to sort and classify the sounds. The results were in agreement with Ford's descriptions of the calls derived
from visual inspection of sound spectrograms of calls. The classification analyses demonstrated that although specific
shared calls from different killer whales were much alike, they could be sorted by the pod/subpod of the whales producing
the calls. A typical analysis, for example, of the N4 call from Clan A (Vancouver, BC), classified 97% of the calls
correctly according to the pod/family of the whales producing the calls. Remaining calls were variant, and likely a result of
individual differences in call sounds. Similar classification analysis were tested on unsorted, unalyzed recordings from
different populations of whales, and these too could be distinguished, with 98.5% correct separation of the calls.
Keywords:
Killer whale calls
;
Sound classification
;
Whale sound analysis
;
Orcinus orca
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Technical Report
Format:
1252525 bytes
Format:
application/pdf
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