Dear colleagues,
My co-authors and I are pleased to announce the following publication:
Caruso F, Sciacca V, Bellia G, De Domenico E, Larosa G, Papale E,
Pellegrino C, Pulvirenti S, Riccobene G, Simeone F, Speziale F, Viola S,
Pavan G. (2015). *Size Distribution of Sperm Whales Acoustically
Identified**during Long Term Deep-Sea Monitoring in the Ionian Sea*.
PLoS ONE 10(12): e0144503. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0144503
Abstract:
The sperm whale (/Physeter macrocephalus/) emits a typical short
acoustic signal, defined as a “click”, almost continuously while diving.
It is produced in different time patterns to acoustically explore the
environment and communicate with conspecifics. Each emitted click has a
multi-pulse structure, resulting from the production of the sound within
the sperm whale’s head. A Stable Inter Pulse Interval (Stable IPI) can
be identified among the pulses that compose a single click. Applying
specific algorithms, the measurement of this interval provides useful
information to assess the total length of the animal recorded. In
January 2005, a cabled hydrophone array was deployed at a depth of 2,100
m in the Central Mediterranean Sea, 25 km offshore Catania (Ionian Sea).
The acoustic antenna, named OνDE (Ocean noise Detection Experiment), was
in operation until November 2006. OνDE provided real time acoustic data
used to perform Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) of cetacean sound
emissions. In this work, an innovative approach was applied to
automatically measure the Stable IPI of the clicks, performing a
cepstrum analysis to the energy (square amplitude) of the signals. About
2,100 five-minute recordings were processed to study the size
distribution of the sperm whales detected during the OνDE long term
deep-sea acoustic monitoring. Stable IPIs were measured in the range
between 2.1 ms and 6.4 ms. The equations of Gordon (1991) and of
Growcott (2011) were used to convert the IPIs into measures of size. The
results revealed that the sperm whales recorded were distributed in
length from about 7.5 m to 14 m. The size category most represented was
from 9 m to 12 m (adult females or juvenile males) and specimens longer
than 14 m (old males) seemed to be absent.
The paper is available online via open-access PLoS ONE:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0144503
Kind Regards and Happy Christmas from the SMM Conference,
Francesco Caruso
[email protected]
--
Francesco Caruso, Marine Biologist, PhD
The Institute for Coastal Marine Environment of the National Research Council
(IAMC-CNR)
Via del Mare 3, 91021, Torretta Granitola, Trapani, ITALY
University of Messina
Department of Biological and Environmental Science
Viale Ferdinando Stagno d'Alcontres 31, 98166 Messina, ITALY
INFN-LNS
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare - Laboratori Nazionali del Sud
Via Santa Sofia 62, 95125 Catania, ITALY
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