Occurrence of Gulf of Mexico Rice's Whale calls at De Soto Canyon

About

The NOAA’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center (SEFSC) and Scripps Institution of Oceanography (Scripps) have been collaboratively deploying long-term passive acoustic monitoring stations throughout the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) since 2010 to monitor the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and subsequent restoration activities on cetaceans. High-frequency Acoustic Recording Packages (HARPs) deployed at the De Soto Canyon (DC) site in the Rice’s whale core distribution area have been continuously recording ambient noise and other acoustic events in the 10 Hz to 100 kHz frequency range. During 2019- 2021, SEFSC conducted analyses of eight years of near-continuous DC HARP recordings (2010-2018) to understand Rice’s whale seasonal and interannual occurrence patterns at this site. During the first phase of this project, SEFSC developed automated Rice’s whale call detectors and analyzed eight years of historic data from the DC HARP in the core distribution area to establish complete occurrence time-series for understanding seasonal and interannual trends and for future habitat modeling and density estimation. Rice’s whale call detections occurred throughout the year at this site with increased call detection rates during summer and fall compared to winter and spring.