title: Real-time reporting of baleen whale passive acoustic detections from ocean gliders.
abstract: In the past decade, much progress has been made in real-time passive acoustic monitoring of marine mammal occurrence and distribution from autonomous platforms (e.g., gliders, floats, buoys), but current systems focus primarily on a single call type produced by a single species, often from a single location. A hardware and software system was developed to detect, classify, and report 14 call types produced by 4 species of baleen whales in real time from ocean gliders. During a 3-week deployment in the central Gulf of Maine in late November and early December 2012, two gliders reported over 25,000 acoustic detections attributed to fin, humpback, sei, and right whales. The overall false detection rate for individual calls was 14%, and for right, humpback, and fin whales, false predictions of occurrence during 15-min reporting periods were 5% or less. Transmitted pitch tracks--compact representations of sounds--allowed unambiguous identification of both humpback and fin whale song. Of the ten cases when whales were sighted during aerial or shipboard surveys and a glider was within 20 km of the sighting location, nine were accompanied by real-time acoustic detections of the same species by the glider within ±12 h of the sighting time.
authors: Biology Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 266 Woods Hole Road, MS #33, Woods Hole, Massachusetts 02543, USA. mbaumgartner@whoi.edu
authors: Mark F
authors: MF
authors: Baumgartner
authors: David M
authors: DM
authors: Fratantoni
authors: Thomas P
authors: TP
authors: Hurst
authors: Moira W
authors: MW
authors: Brown
authors: Tim V N
authors: TV
authors: Cole
authors: Sofie M
authors: SM
authors: Van Parijs
authors: Mark
authors: M
authors: Johnson
mesh_terms: D000162:Acoustics / Q000295:instrumentation*; D000818:Animals; D004867:Equipment Design; D009792:Oceans and Seas; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013045:Species Specificity; D013997:Time Factors; D014159:Transducers; D014828:Vocalization, Animal; D014907:Whales / Q000145:classification / Q000502:physiology*