Dear MarMamers
I am very pleased to announce our latest publication, titled "I beg your pardon? Acoustic behaviour of a wild solitary common dolphin who interacts with harbour porpoises". Our results suggest that this female dolphin produces clicks similar to those emitted by porpoises, after having spent almost 20 years alone in a an area with high density of porpoises in west Scotland.
Please note that an eariler version of the manuscript was mistakenly published by the Publishers (Taylor and Francis), which was online from the 10th of January. The link below is to the corrected version.
Windy greetings
Mel and co-authors
Cosentino M, Nairn D, Coscarella M, Jackson J & Windmill J. I beg you pardon? Acoustic behaviour of a wild solitary common dolphin who interacts with harbour porpoises. Bioacoustics.
Kylie is a solitary common dolphin who inhabits a restricted area within the Firth of Clyde (Scotland). She spends most of her time around navigational buoys in the Hunterston/Fairlie channel, where she has been seen interacting with harbour porpoises. Recordings from 2016 and 2017 were used to study her acoustic behaviour when seen alone and with a porpoise. Clicks were classified as potential porpoise or dolphin clicks based on the waveform, power spectrum, and spectrogram, as well as direction of arrival, inter-click interval, amplitude, and centroid frequency variations. Kylie emitted clicks exclusively, which were of variable nature, including low, mid, and high-frequency (HF, centroid frequency > 100 kHz) as well as broad or narrowband. Some of Kylie’s HF clicks were similar to porpoise clicks both in the time (e.g. polycyclic) and frequency (e.g. narrowband with most energy between 100 and 150 kHz) domains, which cannot fully be explained by recording geometry and directionality effects.
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Mel Cosentino, PhD
Marine Mammal Researcher
Whalesafari, Norway
Aarhus University, Denmark
@PorpoiseLady
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" - E. Burke