title: Acoustical dead zones and the spatial aggregation of whale strandings.
abstract: Cetacean strandings display a marked geographical clustering. We propose a simple, two-dimensional ray-dynamics model of cetacean echolocation to examine the role played by coastline topography in influencing the location and clustering of stranding sites. We find that a number of coastlines known to attract cetacean strandings produce acoustical "Dead Zones" where echolocation signals are severely distorted by purely geometric effects. Using available cetacean stranding data bases from four disparate areas, we show that the geographical clusters in the observations correlate strongly with the regions of distorted echolocation signals as predicted by the model.
authors.affiliation: Graduate Faculty in Physics and Department of Mathematics, City University of New York-College of Staten Island, NY 10314, USA. bas@math.csi.cuny.edu
authors.forename: Bala
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Sundaram
authors.forename: Andrew C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Poje
authors.forename: Richard R
authors.initials: RR
authors.lastname: Veit
authors.forename: Herve
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Nganguia
mesh_terms: D000162:Acoustics; D000818:Animals; D001307:Auditory Perception; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D004455:Echolocation; D008954:Models, Biological; D014907:Whales / Q000502:physiology*