Click communication in wild harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena)
Abstract
Social delphinids employ a vocal repertoire of clicks for echolocation and whistles for communication. Conversely, the less social and acoustically cryptic harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) only produce narrow-band high-frequency (NBHF) clicks with properties that appear poorly suited for communication. Nevertheless, these small odontocetes likely mediate social interactions, such as mate choice and mother-calf contact, with sound. Here, we deployed six tags (DTAG3) on wild porpoises in Danish waters for a total of 96 hours to investigate if the patterns and use of stereotyped NBHF click trains are consistent with a communication function. We show that wild porpoises produce frequent (up to 27 min-1), high-repetition rate click series with repetition rates and output levels different from those of foraging buzzes. These sounds are produced in bouts and frequently co-occur with emission of similar sounds by nearby conspecifics, audible on the tags for >10% of the time. These results suggest that social interactions are more important to this species than their limited social encounters at the surface may indicate and that these interactions are mediated by at least two broad categories of calls composed of short, high-repetition rate click trains that may encode information via the repetition rate of their stereotyped NBHF clicks.
Citation
Sørensen , P M , Wisniewska , D M , Jensen , F H , Johnson , M , Teilmann , J & Madsen , P T 2018 , ' Click communication in wild harbour porpoises ( Phocoena phocoena ) ' , Scientific Reports , vol. 8 , 9702 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-28022-8
Publication
Scientific Reports
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2045-2322Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2018. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Description
The data collection was funded by the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) under contract “Cluster 7 - Effects of underwater noise on marine vertebrates” and “UWE - Under Water Experiments”. FHJ was supported by the Office of Naval Research (N00014-1410410), the Carlsberg Foundation (CF15-0915) and an AIAS-COFUND fellowship from Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies. MJ was supported by the Marine Alliance for Science and Technology Scotland (MASTS) and by a Marie Curie-Sklodowska award.Collections
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