Occurrence of Killer Whales in the Pacific Northwest

About

Passive acoustic monitoring has been conducted along the U.S. west coast, from Central California to Cape Flattery, to monitor movements of endangered Southern resident killer whales (SRKW). Since 2008, four to seventeen Ecological Acoustic Recorders (EARs) have been deployed, depending on the year and available funding. The rate of successful data acquisition has varied each year due to fishery interactions and equipment failures. EARs were programmed to record on a 5–10% duty cycle depending on the year of deployment, resulting in 30–90 seconds of continuous recording every 300–600 seconds with a sampling rate of 25 kHz.