Relationship between sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) click structure and size derived from videocamera images of a depredating whale (sperm whale prey acquisition)

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
• Main Authors: Mathias, Delphine, Thode, Aaron, Straley, Jan, Folkert, Kendall
• Other Authors: Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO - UC San Diego), University of California San Diego (UC San Diego), University of California (UC)-University of California (UC), University of Alaska Southeast (UAS), Chercheur indépendant
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2009
• Subjects: [SDV.EE]Life Sciences [q-bio]/Ecology; environment; Gulf of Alaska; Physeter macrocephalus; Sperm whale; Alaska
• Online Access: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00904060; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00904060/document; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00904060/file/Mathias_2009.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1121/1.3097758

International audience Sperm whales have learned to depredate black cod ﰍAnoplopoma fimbriaﰀ from longline deployments in the Gulf of Alaska. On May 31, 2006, simultaneous acoustic and visual recordings were made of a depredation attempt by a sperm whale at 108 m depth. Because the whale was oriented perpendicularly to the camera as it contacted the longline at a known distance from the camera, the distance from the nose to the hinge of the jaw could be estimated. Allometric relationships obtained from whaling data and skeleton measurements could then be used to estimate both the spermaceti organ length and total length of the animal. An acoustic estimate of animal length was obtained by measuring the inter-pulse interval ﰍIPIﰀ of clicks detected from the animal and using empirical formulas to convert this interval into a length estimate. Two distinct IPIs were extracted from the clicks, one yielding a length estimate that matches the visually-derived length to within experimental error. However, acoustic estimates of spermaceti organ size, derived from standard sound production theories, are inconsistent with the visual estimates, and the derived size of the junk is smaller than that of the spermaceti organ, in contradiction with known anatomical relationships.