Abstract
Passive acoustic monitoring has been successfully used to study deep-diving marine mammal populations. To assess regional population trends of sperm whales in the northern Gulf of Mexico (GoM), including impacts of the Deepwater Horizon platform oil spill in 2010, the Littoral Acoustic Demonstration Center-Gulf Ecological Monitoring and Modeling (LADC-GEMM) consortium collected broadband acoustic data in the Mississippi Valley/Canyon area between 2007 and 2017 using bottom-anchored moorings. These data allow the inference of short-term and long-term variations in site-specific abundances of sperm whales derived from their acoustic activity. A comparison is made between the abundances of sperm whales at specific sites in different years before and after the oil spill by estimating the regional abundance density. The results show that sperm whales were present in the region throughout the entire monitoring period. A habitat preference shift was observed for sperm whales after the 2010 oil spill with higher activities at sites farther away from the spill site. A comparison of the 2007 and 2015 results shows that the overall regional abundance of sperm whales did not recover to pre-spill levels. The results indicate that long-term spatially distributed acoustic monitoring is critical in characterizing sperm whale population changes and in understanding how environmental stressors impact regional abundances and the habitat use of sperm whales.
Highlights
Sperm whales and other deep-diving marine mammal species produce powerful sounds for echolocation, foraging, and communication [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Detection posed by Marques et al [17,21]: In order to detect the acoustic signals of sperm whales and other marine mammal clicks, we developed a multiband spectral energy algorithm that was described in nc (1 −detection ĉ) detail by Li et al [30] in the context Dof =
In order to detect the acoustic signals of sperm whales and other marine mammal clicks, we developed a multiband spectral energy detection algorithm that was described in detail by Li et al [30] in the context of detecting and classifying beaked whale clicks
Summary
Sperm whales and other deep-diving marine mammal species produce powerful sounds for echolocation, foraging, and communication [1,2,3,4,5,6]. In the last two decades, several reliable and well-established survey methods have been used to characterize marine mammal behavior and abundance trends such as visual observations, tagging, and passive acoustic monitoring techniques [7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22]. These techniques are becoming more common in studying the behavior of marine mammals. Only a small subset of animals gets tagged and the efforts are expensive and time consuming
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
