Baleen whale acoustic presence and behaviour at a Mid-Atlantic migratory habitat, the Azores Archipelago
Abstract
The identification of important areas during the annual life cycle of migratory animals, such as baleen whales, is vital for their conservation. In boreal springtime, fin and blue whales feed in the Azores on their way to northern latitudes while sei whales migrate through the archipelago with only occasional feeding. Little is known about their autumn or winter presence or their acoustic behaviour in temperate migratory habitats. This study used a 5-year acoustic data set collected by autonomous recorders in the Azores that were processed and analysed using an automated call detection and classification system. Fin and blue whales were acoustically present in the archipelago from autumn to spring with marked seasonal differences in the use of different call types. Diel patterns of calling activity were only found for fin whales with more calls during the day than night. Sei whales showed a bimodal distribution of acoustic presence in spring and autumn, corresponding to their expected migration patterns. Diel differences in sei whale calling varied with season and location. This work highlights the importance of the Azores as a migratory and wintering habitat for three species of baleen whales and provides novel information on their acoustic behaviour in a mid-Atlantic region.
Citation
Romagosa , M , Baumgartner , M , Cascão , I , Lammers , M O , Marques , T A , Santos , R S & Silva , M A 2020 , ' Baleen whale acoustic presence and behaviour at a Mid-Atlantic migratory habitat, the Azores Archipelago ' , Scientific Reports , vol. 10 , 4766 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-61849-8
Publication
Scientific Reports
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2045-2322Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. 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
This work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), Azores 2020 Operational Programme and Fundo Regional da Ciência e Tecnologia (FRCT) through research projects TRACE (PTDC/MAR/74071/2006), MAPCET (M2.1.2/F/012/2011) and AWARENESS (PTDC/BIA-BMA/30514/201), co-funded by FEDER, COMPETE, QREN, POPH, ERDF, ESF, the Lisbon Regional Operational Programme, and the Portuguese Ministry for Science and Education. Funding for publication fees was provided by Project AWARENESS (PTDC/BIA-BMA/30514/201). Okeanos R&D Centre is supported by FCT, through the strategic fund (UIDB/05634/2020). MR was supported by a DRCT doctoral grant (M3.1.a/F/028/2015) and MAS by an FCT-Investigator contract (IF/00943/2013). TAM thanks partial support by CEAUL (funded by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal, through the project UID/MAT/00006/2013).Collections
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