Effectiveness of Navy Lookout Teams in Detecting Cetacean

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The United States (US) Navy uses lookouts (LOs) to detect objects in the water in the vicinity of ships. One class of object that LOs are trained to detect is marine mammals ; this forms an important component of the Navy’s procedures for marine mammal mitigation during training activities . As well as dedications of marine mammals by these LOs, detections of marine mammals may also be made by other members of the ship’s crew such as officers on the bridge (“watchstanders”) or sonar technicians, although acoustic detections require visual confirmation. We refer to these personnel together as the “lookout team” (LT). The primary goal of this project was to determine how effective LTs are at detecting marin