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Organized Oral Session

Hybrid Session

Session: : All Ears In: Advancing Ecology and Conservation with Bioacoustics

OOS 42-3 - Eavesdropping on multi-species marine mammal communities along the western North Atlantic Ocean shelf-break

Wednesday, August 9, 2023
2:00 PM – 2:15 PM PDT
Location: 252
Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is an efficient tool for observing ocean environments, including marine mammal acoustic presence. Long-term PAM coupled with reliable detectors and classifiers can efficiently provide information for assessing marine mammal community composition. This study analyzed data collected by high-frequency PAM recorders deployed at ten locations between 30°0'N and 42°0'N in the western North Atlantic Ocean. Daily acoustic presence of 13 known marine mammal species and grouped unknown odontocetes was averaged into monthly relative abundance for 38 months between April 2016 and June 2019. Dissimilarity in community composition across the sampling locations was evaluated with classification trees. In all years individually, as well as combined, detections of Gervais’ beaked whale (Mesoplodon europaeus) were the root node, splitting sites by latitude around 38°0'N and grouping the five sites to the south and five sites to the north. Secondary tree nodes were further divided by other beaked whale species and additional splits were inclusive of other odontocetes. The presence of mysticetes also varied by site and season, and co-occurrence comparisons revealed distinctive communities at each site. This study highlights the significance of identifying beaked whales to species rather than grouping them, as is often done in visual survey data.