Abstract
Despite dedicated research has been carried out to adequately map the distribution of the sperm whale in the Mediterranean Sea, unlike other regions of the world, the species population status is still presently uncertain. The analysis of two years of continuous acoustic data provided by the ANTARES neutrino telescope revealed the year-round presence of sperm whales in the Ligurian Sea, probably associated with the availability of cephalopods in the region. The presence of the Ligurian Sea sperm whales was demonstrated through the real-time analysis of audio data streamed from a cabled-to-shore deep-sea observatory that allowed the hourly tracking of their long-range echolocation behaviour on the Internet. Interestingly, the same acoustic analysis indicated that the occurrence of surface shipping noise would apparently not condition the foraging behaviour of the sperm whale in the area, since shipping noise was almost always present when sperm whales were acoustically detected. The continuous presence of the sperm whale in the region confirms the ecological value of the Ligurian sea and the importance of ANTARES to help monitoring its ecosystems.
Highlights
Despite dedicated research has been carried out to adequately map the distribution of the sperm whale in the Mediterranean Sea, unlike other regions of the world, the species population status is still presently uncertain
SW, UC, and IS stand for the sperm whale, ultrasonic cetacean and shipping classes. When they are followed by a C (SWC, ultrasonic cetacean impulses (UCC), ISC) they describe the output of the Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) classifier as explained in the Methods section
When they are followed by an I (SWI, UCI, ISI) they represent the smoothed number of classified impulses in an analysed data segment
Summary
Despite dedicated research has been carried out to adequately map the distribution of the sperm whale in the Mediterranean Sea, unlike other regions of the world, the species population status is still presently uncertain. Most oceanographic instruments moored on the seafloor are not connected with the surface: they have to run on batteries and store data locally, implying that scientists only have access to their data after the recovery of the instrument[3] Cabled observatories such as ANTARES (France), JAMSTEC (Japan), NEPTUNE (Canada) and OBSEA (Spain), remove these restrictions by providing electrical power and real-time data acquisition, and the possibility for scientists to interact directly with their sensors. They can control them and monitor the environment in reaction to the observation of peculiar events. Amongst this wide variety of changes, the decades will see increasing levels of offshore industrial development, and this will almost certainly lead to increased amounts of noise pollution in the oceans
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