A Challange for Bioacoustics - Antarctic Minke Whale Acoustics

• Main Author: Kindermann, Lars
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: Antarctic; Southern Ocean; Antarc*; Antarctic Minke whale; Antarctica; baleen whale; Ice Shelf; minke whale
• Online Access: https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/34686/; https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/34686/1/NIPS2013-Kindermann-Acoustics.pdf; http://sabiod.univ-tln.fr/NIPS4B2013_book.pdf; https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.43108; https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.43108.d001

Antarctic Minke whales are the most abundant baleen whale species on earth. As the main target of today’s controversial “scientific whaling” and possibly of a reestablished commercial whaling enterprise as proposed by some countries, they are in the focus of interest for many NGOs and the public. Until few month ago nothing was known about their vocal behavior, so they had no “own voice” and no bioacoustic methods could be used to investigate the many open questions about them. On the other hand, for several decades a strange sound of unknown origin has been recorded repeatedly in the Southern Ocean – but only during polar winter when the sea is covered almost completely by a dense layer of ice. Long term recordings from our acoustic observatory at the ice shelf show it is in fact the dominant acoustic emission around Antarctica during that time. Tenth of thousands of hours of this sound have been recorded during the last 8 years and are published under an open access policy. And recently, during a winter expedition to Antarctica we could finally assign this sound to the Minkies. We invite everybody to look into that data using advanced methods to extract definitely new knowledge about this important species.