| Summary: | Author Posting. © Elsevier B.V., 2008. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Animal Behaviour 76 (2008): 1429-1434, doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.06.016. A common problem in animal behavior is determining whether the rate at which a certain behavioural event occurs is affected by an environmental or other factor. In the example considered later in this paper, the event is a vocalization by an individual sperm whale and the factor is the operation or non-operation of an underwater sound source. A typical experiment to test for such effects involves observing animals during control and treatment periods and recording the times of the events that occur in each. In statistical terminology, the data arising from such an experiment – the times at which events of a specified type occur – represent a point process (Cox & Lewis 1978). Events in a point process are treated as having no duration. Although this is not strictly correct for behavioural events, the approximation is reasonable when the duration of events is small in relation to the interval between them. Funding for the sperm whale experiments was provided by the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Department of the Interior Minerals Management Service Cooperative Agreements Nos. 1435-01-02-CA-321 85186 and NA87RJ0445, and the Industry Research Funding Coalition.
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