RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 Aguilar, N., Visser, F., Tyack, P., Alcázar, J., Ruxton, G., Arranz, P., Madsen, P., Johnson, M. 2020. Fear of killer whales drives extreme synchrony in deep diving beaked whales. Scientific Reports, 10: 13. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-55911-3
A1 Alcázar Treviño, Jesús
A1 Aguilar de Soto, Natacha
A1 Visser, Fleur
A1 Tyack, Peter L.
A1 Ruxton, Graeme
A1 Arranz, Patricia
A1 Madsen, Peter T.
A1 Johnson, Mark
A2 Ingeniería Industrial
K1 Fear of predation
K1 Whales
K1 Synchrony
AB Fear of predation can induce profound changes in the behaviour and physiology of prey species even if predator encounters are infrequent. For echolocating toothed whales, the use of sound to forage exposes them to detection by eavesdropping predators, but while some species exploit social defencesor produce cryptic acoustic signals, deep-diving beaked whales, well known for mass-strandings induced by navy sonar, seem enigmatically defenceless against their main predator, killer whales. Here we test the hypothesis that the stereotyped group diving and vocal behaviour of beaked whales has benefts for abatement of predation risk and thus could have been driven by fear of predation over evolutionary time. Biologging data from 14 Blainville’s and 12 Cuvier’s beaked whales show that group members have an extreme synchronicity, overlapping vocal foraging time by 98% despite huntingindividually, thereby reducing group temporal availability for acoustic detection by killer whales to <25%. Groups also perform a coordinated silent ascent in an unpredictable direction, covering a mean of 1km horizontal distance from their last vocal position. This tactic sacrifces 35% of foraging time butreduces by an order of magnitude the risk of interception by killer whales. These predator abatement behaviours have likely served beaked whales over millions of years, but may become maladaptive by playing a role in mass strandings induced by man-made predator-like sonar sounds.
PB Nature Research
SN 2045-2322
YR 2020
FD 2020
LK http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/34691
UL http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/34691
LA en
DS Repositorio institucional de la Universidad de La Laguna
RD 29-jun-2024