Population structure of humpback whales in the western and central South Pacific Ocean as determined by vocal exchange among populations

• Published in: Conservation Biology
• Main Authors: Garland, Ellen C., Goldizen, Anne W., Lilley, Matthew S., Rekdahl, Melinda L., Garrigue, Claire, Constantine, Rochelle, Hauser, Nan Daeschler, Poole, M. Michael, Robbins, Jooke, Noad, Michael J.
• Other Authors: University of St Andrews. School of Biology, University of St Andrews. Sea Mammal Research Unit, University of St Andrews. Centre for Social Learning & Cognitive Evolution, University of St Andrews. Centre for Biological Diversity
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: Acoustic display; Humpback whale; Megaptera novaeangliae; Population structure; Song; South Pacific; Vocal; Whale culture; Canto; Cultivo de ballenas; Demostracion acustica; Estructura poblacional; Sur del Pacifico; Yubarta; GE Environmental Sciences; GC Oceanography; QH301 Biology; BDC; R2C; GE; GC; QH301; Ballenas; Pacific; Tonga; Humpback Whale
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/8568; https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12492; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cobi.12492/suppinfo

The study was supported by major grants from the Sea World Research and Rescue Foundation Inc., the Australian Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, and the Winifred Violet Scott Estate to M.J.N. and E.C.G. and from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) to the South Pacific Whale Research Consortium (SPWRC). For cetaceans, population structure is traditionally determined by molecular genetics or photographically identified individuals. Acoustic data, however, has provided information on movement and population structure with less effort and cost than traditional methods in an array of taxa. Male humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) produce a continually evolving vocal sexual display, or song, that is similar among all males in a population. The rapid cultural transmission (the transfer of information or behavior between conspecifics through social learning) of different versions of this display between distinct but interconnected populations in the western and central South Pacific region presents a unique way to investigate population structure based on the movement dynamics of a song (acoustic) display. Using 11 years of data, we investigated an acoustically based population structure for the region by comparing stereotyped song sequences among populations and years. We used the Levenshtein distance technique to group previously defined populations into (vocally based) clusters based on the overall similarity of their song display in space and time. We identified the following distinct vocal clusters: western cluster, 1 population off eastern Australia; central cluster, populations around New Caledonia, Tonga, and American Samoa; and eastern region, either a single cluster or 2 clusters, one around the Cook Islands and the other off French Polynesia. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that each breeding aggregation represents a distinct population (each occupied a single, terminal node) in a metapopulation, similar to the current understanding of population ...