Dear all, To improve re-sightings of beaked whales and support public involvement in research we have created the open tool www.cetabase.info The database is open to anybody who want to use it for their own research or to collaborate with others. All users can see all photos, but each user can only modify the data corresponding to his/her account. You need to accept the legal terms of use (i.e. to respect the property of the information of others) before accessing the database. If you want to use the photos for something else than enjoyment, you need to ask for permit to the user who loaded them in the database. You don't need to register to see the photos in the database, but if you want access to the analysis tools of the database you need to create an account and log in with it. Your data is completely safe and associated only to this database, which is maintained by University of La Laguna Other species in addition to beaked whales can be included. At the moment there are photos and sightings of Blainville's and Cuvier's beaked whales in the Canary Islands and these require a special format to include photos with markings from all over the body. If you want to enter dolphins, or sperm whales, the photo-page is set for the photoID needs of those species. The designer of the database is happy to donate his time for small changes if required, but if you want large re-formats to fit the database to your data you'd need to arrange it more seriously. The original language of the database is spanish, but it is translated to english and instructions of use are available in the page in both languages (although they still need some polishing, this is a work in progress) Hope you may find this tool useful. Please do not hesitate in contacting if you may require further information Best regards Natacha PD. There is a new paper on Blainville's beaked whale social communication sounds, Aguilar Soto, N., Johnson., M., Tyack., P., Arranz, P., Revelli, E., Marrero, J., Fais, A., Madsen, P. No shallow talk: deep social communication of Blainville´s beaked whales. Marine Mammal Science. DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-7692.2011.00495.x Abstract Communicating animals must balance fitness benefits against the costs of signaling, such as increased predation risk. Cetaceans communicate mainly with sound and near-surface vocalizations can place signalers at risk from shallow-diving top-predators with acute hearing such as killer whales. Beaked whales are deep-divers living in small cohesive groups with little social defense from predation and little if anything is known about their acoustic communication. Here eight Blainville’s beaked whales were studied with suction-cup attached DTAGs to provide the first report on social communication as a function of diving behavior for any of the 21 ziphiid species. Tagged whales produced two novel signals with apparent communicative functions: i) fast series of ultrasonic FM clicks (rasps) were recorded from six individuals, and ii) harmonically rich short whistles with a mean fundamental frequency of 12kHz were recorded from one whale at up to 900m depth, the deepest whistles recorded from a marine mammal. Blainville´s were silent 80% of the time, whenever shallower than 170m depth and during the prolonged (19min) silent ascents from vocal dives. This behavior limits the ability of shallow-diving predators to track Blainville´s acoustically, providing a striking example of the evolutionary influence of the risk of predation on animal communication. You might be interested in a good compilation of DTAG papers on beaked whales. This can be found in the following web page (also bilingual and with some scientific divulgation articles in spanish) http://webpages.ull.es/users/cetaceos ********************** Natacha Aguilar Head Cetacean Research Line Dept. Animal Biology La Laguna University Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain