Fear of Killer Whales Drives Extreme Synchrony in Deep Diving Beaked Whales
Fear of predation can induce profound changes in the behaviour and physiology of prey species even if predator encounters are infrequent. For echolocating toothed whales, the use of sound to forage exposes them to detection by eavesdropping predators, but while some species exploit social defences o...
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ftpubmed:oai:pubmedcentral.nih.gov:7005263 2023-05-15T18:33:32+02:00 Fear of Killer Whales Drives Extreme Synchrony in Deep Diving Beaked Whales Aguilar de Soto, Natacha Visser, Fleur Tyack, Peter L. Alcazar, Jesús Ruxton, Graeme Arranz, Patricia Madsen, Peter T. Johnson, Mark 2020-02-06 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7005263/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32029750 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-55911-3 en eng Nature Publishing Group UK http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7005263/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32029750 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-55911-3 © The Author(s) 2020 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 2020 ftpubmed https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-55911-3 2020-02-23T01:20:20Z Fear of predation can induce profound changes in the behaviour and physiology of prey species even if predator encounters are infrequent. For echolocating toothed whales, the use of sound to forage exposes them to detection by eavesdropping predators, but while some species exploit social defences or produce cryptic acoustic signals, deep-diving beaked whales, well known for mass-strandings induced by navy sonar, seem enigmatically defenceless against their main predator, killer whales. Here we test the hypothesis that the stereotyped group diving and vocal behaviour of beaked whales has benefits for abatement of predation risk and thus could have been driven by fear of predation over evolutionary time. Biologging data from 14 Blainville’s and 12 Cuvier’s beaked whales show that group members have an extreme synchronicity, overlapping vocal foraging time by 98% despite hunting individually, thereby reducing group temporal availability for acoustic detection by killer whales to <25%. Groups also perform a coordinated silent ascent in an unpredictable direction, covering a mean of 1 km horizontal distance from their last vocal position. This tactic sacrifices 35% of foraging time but reduces by an order of magnitude the risk of interception by killer whales. These predator abatement behaviours have likely served beaked whales over millions of years, but may become maladaptive by playing a role in mass strandings induced by man-made predator-like sonar sounds. Text toothed whales PubMed Central (PMC) Scientific Reports 10 1 |
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Article Aguilar de Soto, Natacha Visser, Fleur Tyack, Peter L. Alcazar, Jesús Ruxton, Graeme Arranz, Patricia Madsen, Peter T. Johnson, Mark Fear of Killer Whales Drives Extreme Synchrony in Deep Diving Beaked Whales |
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Fear of predation can induce profound changes in the behaviour and physiology of prey species even if predator encounters are infrequent. For echolocating toothed whales, the use of sound to forage exposes them to detection by eavesdropping predators, but while some species exploit social defences or produce cryptic acoustic signals, deep-diving beaked whales, well known for mass-strandings induced by navy sonar, seem enigmatically defenceless against their main predator, killer whales. Here we test the hypothesis that the stereotyped group diving and vocal behaviour of beaked whales has benefits for abatement of predation risk and thus could have been driven by fear of predation over evolutionary time. Biologging data from 14 Blainville’s and 12 Cuvier’s beaked whales show that group members have an extreme synchronicity, overlapping vocal foraging time by 98% despite hunting individually, thereby reducing group temporal availability for acoustic detection by killer whales to <25%. Groups also perform a coordinated silent ascent in an unpredictable direction, covering a mean of 1 km horizontal distance from their last vocal position. This tactic sacrifices 35% of foraging time but reduces by an order of magnitude the risk of interception by killer whales. These predator abatement behaviours have likely served beaked whales over millions of years, but may become maladaptive by playing a role in mass strandings induced by man-made predator-like sonar sounds. |
format |
Text |
author |
Aguilar de Soto, Natacha Visser, Fleur Tyack, Peter L. Alcazar, Jesús Ruxton, Graeme Arranz, Patricia Madsen, Peter T. Johnson, Mark |
author_facet |
Aguilar de Soto, Natacha Visser, Fleur Tyack, Peter L. Alcazar, Jesús Ruxton, Graeme Arranz, Patricia Madsen, Peter T. Johnson, Mark |
author_sort |
Aguilar de Soto, Natacha |
title |
Fear of Killer Whales Drives Extreme Synchrony in Deep Diving Beaked Whales |
title_short |
Fear of Killer Whales Drives Extreme Synchrony in Deep Diving Beaked Whales |
title_full |
Fear of Killer Whales Drives Extreme Synchrony in Deep Diving Beaked Whales |
title_fullStr |
Fear of Killer Whales Drives Extreme Synchrony in Deep Diving Beaked Whales |
title_full_unstemmed |
Fear of Killer Whales Drives Extreme Synchrony in Deep Diving Beaked Whales |
title_sort |
fear of killer whales drives extreme synchrony in deep diving beaked whales |
publisher |
Nature Publishing Group UK |
publishDate |
2020 |
url |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7005263/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32029750 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-55911-3 |
genre |
toothed whales |
genre_facet |
toothed whales |
op_relation |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7005263/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32029750 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-55911-3 |
op_rights |
© The Author(s) 2020 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/s41598-019-55911-3 |
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Scientific Reports |
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10 |
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1766218149649186816 |