Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author Posting. © Acoustical Society of America, 2011. This article is posted here by permission of Acoustical Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 129 (2011): 476-482, doi:10.1121/1.3504708.
Description:
Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) are one of several baleen whale species in the Northwest Atlantic that coexist with vessel traffic and anthropogenic noise. Passive acoustic monitoring strategies can be used in conservation management, but the first step toward understanding the acoustic behavior of a species is a good description of its acoustic repertoire. Digital acoustic tags (DTAGs) were placed on humpback whales in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary to record and describe the non-song sounds being produced in conjunction with foraging activities. Peak frequencies of sounds were generally less than 1 kHz, but ranged as high as 6 kHz, and sounds were generally less than 1 s in duration. Cluster analysis distilled the dataset into eight groups of sounds with similar acoustic properties. The two most stereotyped and distinctive types (“wops” and “grunts”) were also identified aurally as candidates for use in passive acoustic monitoring. This identification of two of the most common sound types will be useful for moving forward conservation efforts on this Northwest Atlantic feeding ground.
Description:
This paper was funded by the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s National
Marine Sanctuaries Program. It was also sponsored in part
by the University of Hawaii Sea Grant College Program,
School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, under
Institutional Grant No. NA05OAR4171048 from the NOAA
Office of Sea Grant, Department of Commerce.
Keywords:
Bioacoustics
;
Biocommunications
;
Underwater sound
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
