the relationship among oceanography, prey fields, and beaked whale foraging habitat in the tongue of the ocean在海洋的关系,猎物字段和突吻鲸觅食生境在海洋的舌头.pdfVIP

The Relationship among Oceanography, Prey Fields, and Beaked Whale Foraging Habitat in the Tongue of the Ocean 1,2,3 1,4 5 1 6 Elliott L. Hazen *, Douglas P. Nowacek , Louis St. Laurent , Patrick N. Halpin , David J. Moretti 1 Duke University Marine Lab, Beaufort, North Carolina, United States of America, 2 Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States of America, 3 Pacific Fisheries Environmental Lab, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, Pacific Grove, California, United States of America, 4 Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, United States of America, 5 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, United States of America, 6 Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Newport, Rhode Island, United States of America Abstract Beaked whales, specifically Blainville’s (Mesoplodon densirostris) and Cuvier’s (Ziphius cavirostris), are known to feed in the Tongue of the Ocean, Bahamas. These whales can be reliably detected and often localized within the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC) acoustic sensor system. The AUTEC range is a regularly spaced bottom mounted hydrophone array covering .350 nm2 providing a valuable network to record anthropogenic noise and marine mammal vocalizations. Assessments of the potential risks of noise exposure to beaked whales have historically occurred in the absence of information about the physical and biological environments in which these animals are distributed. In the fall of 2008, we used a downward looking 38 kHz SIMRAD EK60 echosounder to measure prey scattering layers concurrent with fine scale turbulence measur