Journal article
Cryptic vocal behavior of foraging humpback whales on feeding grounds in West Greenland
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol.150(4), pp.2879-2887
2021
Abstract
Male humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) sing in mating aggregations in the form of song displays, but much less is known about how both sexes use sound on their feeding grounds. Here, we test different hypotheses about the function of vocalizations in 14 foraging humpback whales tagged with sound and movement recording Dtags in Greenland. We show that this population of foraging humpback whales have an overall low call rate of 11.9 calls h−1 (inter-quartile range = 12.1) with no support for the hypotheses that they employ sound in the localization or manipulation of prey nor in the coordination of lunge feeding. The calls had a mean received level of 135 ± 5dB re 1 μPa, which is some 30 dB lower than maximum levels of song recorded on similar deployed tags, suggesting a much smaller active space of these vocalizations. This reduced active space might, in concert with low call rates, serve to mitigate eavesdropping by predatory killer whales or conspecifics competing for the same prey resources. We conclude that feeding humpback whales in Greenland produce low level, infrequent calls suggesting that calling is not a prerequisite for successful feeding, but likely serves to mediate within group social interactions
Details
- Title
- Cryptic vocal behavior of foraging humpback whales on feeding grounds in West Greenland
- Authors/Creators
- S.K.A. Videsen (Author/Creator)M. Simon (Author/Creator)M. Johnson (Author/Creator)P.T. Madsen (Author/Creator)F. Christiansen (Author/Creator)
- Publication Details
- The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol.150(4), pp.2879-2887
- Publisher
- Acoustical Society of America
- Identifiers
- 991005545550107891
- Copyright
- © 2021 Acoustical Society of America.
- Murdoch Affiliation
- Murdoch University
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Journal article
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- International collaboration
- Citation topics
- 3 Agriculture, Environment & Ecology
- 3.35 Zoology & Animal Ecology
- 3.35.796 Marine Mammal Ecology
- Web Of Science research areas
- Acoustics
- Audiology & Speech-language Pathology
- ESI research areas
- Physics