Deep-diving pilot whales make cheap, but powerful, echolocation clicks with 50 µL of air
Echolocating toothed whales produce powerful clicks pneumatically to detect prey in the deep sea where this long-range sensory channel makes them formidable top predators. However, air supplies for sound production compress with depth following Boyle’s law suggesting that deep-diving whales must use...
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ftpubmed:oai:pubmedcentral.nih.gov:6823382 2023-05-15T18:33:29+02:00 Deep-diving pilot whales make cheap, but powerful, echolocation clicks with 50 µL of air Foskolos, Ilias Aguilar de Soto, Natacha Madsen, Peter Teglberg Johnson, Mark 2019-10-31 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6823382/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31673021 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-51619-6 en eng Nature Publishing Group UK http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6823382/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31673021 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-51619-6 © The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. CC-BY Article Text 2019 ftpubmed https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-51619-6 2019-11-17T01:21:30Z Echolocating toothed whales produce powerful clicks pneumatically to detect prey in the deep sea where this long-range sensory channel makes them formidable top predators. However, air supplies for sound production compress with depth following Boyle’s law suggesting that deep-diving whales must use very small air volumes per echolocation click to facilitate continuous sensory flow in foraging dives. Here we test this hypothesis by analysing click-induced acoustic resonances in the nasal air sacs, recorded by biologging tags. Using 27000 clicks from 102 dives of 23 tagged pilot whales (Globicephala macrorhynchus), we show that click production requires only 50 µL of air/click at 500 m depth increasing gradually to 100 µL at 1000 m. With such small air volumes, the metabolic cost of sound production is on the order of 40 J per dive which is a negligible fraction of the field metabolic rate. Nonetheless, whales must make frequent pauses in echolocation to recycle air between nasal sacs. Thus, frugal use of air and periodic recycling of very limited air volumes enable pilot whales, and likely other toothed whales, to echolocate cheaply and almost continuously throughout foraging dives, providing them with a strong sensory advantage in diverse aquatic habitats. Text toothed whales PubMed Central (PMC) Scientific Reports 9 1 |
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Article Foskolos, Ilias Aguilar de Soto, Natacha Madsen, Peter Teglberg Johnson, Mark Deep-diving pilot whales make cheap, but powerful, echolocation clicks with 50 µL of air |
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Echolocating toothed whales produce powerful clicks pneumatically to detect prey in the deep sea where this long-range sensory channel makes them formidable top predators. However, air supplies for sound production compress with depth following Boyle’s law suggesting that deep-diving whales must use very small air volumes per echolocation click to facilitate continuous sensory flow in foraging dives. Here we test this hypothesis by analysing click-induced acoustic resonances in the nasal air sacs, recorded by biologging tags. Using 27000 clicks from 102 dives of 23 tagged pilot whales (Globicephala macrorhynchus), we show that click production requires only 50 µL of air/click at 500 m depth increasing gradually to 100 µL at 1000 m. With such small air volumes, the metabolic cost of sound production is on the order of 40 J per dive which is a negligible fraction of the field metabolic rate. Nonetheless, whales must make frequent pauses in echolocation to recycle air between nasal sacs. Thus, frugal use of air and periodic recycling of very limited air volumes enable pilot whales, and likely other toothed whales, to echolocate cheaply and almost continuously throughout foraging dives, providing them with a strong sensory advantage in diverse aquatic habitats. |
format |
Text |
author |
Foskolos, Ilias Aguilar de Soto, Natacha Madsen, Peter Teglberg Johnson, Mark |
author_facet |
Foskolos, Ilias Aguilar de Soto, Natacha Madsen, Peter Teglberg Johnson, Mark |
author_sort |
Foskolos, Ilias |
title |
Deep-diving pilot whales make cheap, but powerful, echolocation clicks with 50 µL of air |
title_short |
Deep-diving pilot whales make cheap, but powerful, echolocation clicks with 50 µL of air |
title_full |
Deep-diving pilot whales make cheap, but powerful, echolocation clicks with 50 µL of air |
title_fullStr |
Deep-diving pilot whales make cheap, but powerful, echolocation clicks with 50 µL of air |
title_full_unstemmed |
Deep-diving pilot whales make cheap, but powerful, echolocation clicks with 50 µL of air |
title_sort |
deep-diving pilot whales make cheap, but powerful, echolocation clicks with 50 µl of air |
publisher |
Nature Publishing Group UK |
publishDate |
2019 |
url |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6823382/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31673021 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-51619-6 |
genre |
toothed whales |
genre_facet |
toothed whales |
op_relation |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6823382/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31673021 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-51619-6 |
op_rights |
© The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
op_rightsnorm |
CC-BY |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-51619-6 |
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Scientific Reports |
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9 |
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1 |
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1766218095467167744 |