North Pacific minke whales call rapidly when calling conspecifics are nearby

This research was supported by Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet (Code N465JR, Award Number N0007020WR0EP8F) and tool development utilized for this analysis was supported by the U.S. Navy’s Living Marine Resources Program (Award Number N0002520WR0141R).North Pacific minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) boing calls are commonly detected in Hawaiian waters. When producing boing vocalizations, minke whales seem to be in one of two calling behavioral states. Most often minke whales produce boings with inter-call intervals of several minutes, but sometimes minke whales call rapidly with inter-call intervals of less than a minute. Since minke whales are difficult to detect visually, cue-rate-based density estimation using passive acoustic monitoring has been proposed. However, the variables that influence cue rate or calling rate are poorly understood in most whales, including minke whales. We collected passive acoustic recordings from 47 bottom-mounted hydrophones at the Pacific Missile Range Facility’s instrumented range off the coast of Kauaʻi, Hawaiʻi to test the hypothesis that minke whales call more rapidly when closer in proximity to other calling conspecifics. A total of 599 days of data were recorded between August 2012 and July 2017 and were automatically post-processed to detect, classify, and localize calls. Localized calls were grouped into tracks and manually validated, resulting in 509 individual tracks composed of 36,033 calls within a 16 x 39 km focal study area. Tracked minke whales exhibited a strong bimodal call rate with means of one call every 6.85 min (σ= 2.54 min) and 0.63 min (σ= 0.36 min). We ran hidden Markov models to quantify the relationship between call rate and the distance to the nearest calling conspecific. Overall, the probability of the higher call rate occurring increased as the distance to the nearest conspecific decreased, and the probability of the lower call rate occurring increased as the distance to the nearest conspecific increased. We also examined individual track data and found that minke whales may also exhibit other responses (i.e. increased speed, changes in heading, and cessation of calling) when calling conspecifics are nearby. These findings provide new information about minke whale calling behavior in what is likely a breeding area.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

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Despite the growing number of confident binary black hole coalescences observed through gravitational waves so far, the astrophysical origin of these binaries remains uncertain. Orbital eccentricity is one of the clearest tracers of binary formation channels. Identifying binary eccentricity, however, remains challenging due to the limited availability of gravitational waveforms that include effects of eccentricity. Here, we present observational results for a waveform-independent search sensitive to eccentric black hole coalescences, covering the third observing run (O3) of the LIGO and Virgo detectors. We identified no new high-significance candidates beyond those that were already identified with searches focusing on quasi-circular binaries. We determine the sensitivity of our search to high-mass (total mass M>70 M⊙) binaries covering eccentricities up to 0.3 at 15 Hz orbital frequency, and use this to compare model predictions to search results. Assuming all detections are indeed quasi-circular, for our fiducial population model, we place an upper limit for the merger rate density of high-mass binaries with eccentricities 0<e≤0.3 at 0.33 Gpc−3 yr−1 at 90\% confidence level

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Correction to: Cluster identification, selection, and description in Cluster randomized crossover trials: the PREP-IT trials

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article