Using long-term passive acoustic monitoring to examine blue whale migration in a changing world ...
Blue whales, like many other baleen whale species, are threatened by anthropogenic activities and climate change. In the previous century, blue whales were hunted to the brink of extinction and their numbers remain at a fraction of their original population. Studying blue whales can be difficult due...
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Format: | Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis |
Language: | English |
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UNSW Sydney
2023
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Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/25370 http://hdl.handle.net/1959.4/101663 |
Summary: | Blue whales, like many other baleen whale species, are threatened by anthropogenic activities and climate change. In the previous century, blue whales were hunted to the brink of extinction and their numbers remain at a fraction of their original population. Studying blue whales can be difficult due to their low numbers and often remote habitat where they are found. To identify how climate change is affecting blue whales, long term data is needed. However long-term studies can be logistically difficult and financially costly. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) provides a cost-effective and non-invasive way for collecting long-term data on vocal species. PAM is a suitable tool for studying blue whales as they produce highly stereotypical songs. In this thesis, I examined the acoustic presence of several blue whale populations across the Southern Hemisphere. I examined the degree of overlap between Antarctic blue whales and subantarctic blue whales in the Southeast Pacific Ocean and the Southeast Indian Ocean. ... |
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