Dear colleagues, I am pleased to announce our recent paper:
Synchronization of bowhead whales by Podolskiy EA, Teilmann J, Heide-Jørgensen MP (2024), Physical Review Res., DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.6.033174 https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.6.033174 [Abstract] Inferring animal behavior from irregular tracking data is a challenging area of research. It is particularly difficult to determine if whales, who intermittently explore different depths while staying in the same acoustic medium, synchronize their days with their prey and each other over kilometer-scale distances. Here, we aim to better understand the diving behavior of bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) in Disko Bay, West Greenland, using the largest high-frequency dive–depth dataset to date (144 days at 1 Hz from 12 different whales) and nonlinear dynamics, whereby we consider the whales to be chaotic (aperiodic) oscillators. We find that foraging whales dive deeper during the daytime in spring, with this diving behavior being in apparent synchrony with their vertically migrating prey. Furthermore, we demonstrate that bowhead whales can synchronize their behavior with each other for up to a week while staying within a range of up to ∼100 km. This discovery is in agreement with the acoustic herd theory of long-range signalling in baleen whales. On the other hand, the synchrony might emerge when animals experience similar ecological conditions, which are, however, difficult to name because targeted depths and locations were separated for 100s of m and 10s of km, respectively. Our study identifies a framework for studying the sociality and behavior of such chaotically moving, unrestrained marine animals and calls for more simultaneous tagging campaigns. Best regards, Evgeny Podolskiy, Assoc. Prof. Arctic Research Center, Hokkaido University, Japan
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