Understanding Effects of Whale-Watching Vessel Noise on Humpback Whale Song in the North Pacific Coast of Colombia With Propagation Models of Masking and Acoustic Data Observations

Maria Paula Rey-Baquero,Andrea Luna-Acosta,Kerri D Seger,Natalia Botero-Acosta,Laura Valentina Huertas-Amaya,John K Boyle,Sarah Rosenthal,Ann Carole Vallejo,Christina E Perazio

doi:10.3389/fmars.2021.623724

Abstract

Soundscapes with minimal anthropogenic noise sources are key for the survival and effective communication of marine mammals. The Gulf of Tribugá is part of the breeding ground for humpback whale Stock G. Currently, no large-scale infrastructure exists on the Gulf's coastline, making it an area with high biodiversity and little anthropogenic noise. Whale-watching is one of the few human activities that contributes to the soundscape. By Morro Mico, on the southern limit of the Utría Natural National Park, an Ecological Acoustic Recorder (EAR, Oceanwide Science Institute) was deployed in the Gulf to record samples of acoustic activity from October to November 2018. It recorded for 10-min intervals with 20-min lapses for a duty cycle of 33.3%. One of the common peak frequencies of humpback whale song units from these recordings was used as input to an acoustic propagation model using the parabolic equation to simulate the communication space of a humpback whale when zero, one, and two boats are present. GPS positions of theodolite data from various whale watching scenarios in the Gulf were used to inform the models. Model results indicate that humpback whale song communication space could be reduced by as much as 63% in the presence of even one whale-watching boat. The boats traveling through the Gulf are the same as those used in whale-watching, and their engine noise while passing Morro Mico coincided with song structural and temporal changes observed in the acoustic data. Combiningin situdata with acoustic models can advance the understanding of the spatio-temporal acoustic reactions of whales when their vocalizations are masked by boat noise. This project serves as an approximation of how humpback whale Stock G may respond to whale-watching vessel noise in the Gulf of Tribugá.

Highlights

Anthropogenic noise has increased in recent years as a result of human population growth, transportation network expansion, urbanization, and resource extraction (Shannon et al, 2016)
Once noise from a single boat was included in the model (Figure 2 top right), the whale’s communication space was reduced further (Figure 2 bottom right), in the areas that were audible with just the presence of ambient noise (SNR >10 dB)
The propagation modeling signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) planview maps, bar plots, and tables illustrate how far a hypothetical whale song could transmit through its habitat with only ambient noise as compared to in the presence of noise from one or two boats used in whalewatching activities

Summary

Introduction

Anthropogenic noise has increased in recent years as a result of human population growth, transportation network expansion, urbanization, and resource extraction (Shannon et al, 2016). Anthropogenic noise has increased as shipping lanes have expanded (McDonald et al, 2006; Hildebrand, 2009). Human-generated noise often overlaps (masks) biological sounds in time and frequency, which could mean a loss of communication space for marine fauna (Cholewiak et al, 2018). For the purposes of this paper, masking is defined as a situation when noise interferes with an animal’s ability to detect, interpret, and/or discriminate a sound (Fletcher and Munson, 1937). Because of masking release strategies (Erbe et al, 2016), this is not always

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Conclusion