Biblioteca

Soundscapes with minimal anthropogenic noise sources are key for the survival and effective communication of marine mammals. The Gulf of Tribugá is part of the breeding ground for humpback whale Stock G. Currently, no large-scale infrastructure exists on the Gulf's coastline, making it an area with high biodiversity and little anthropogenic noise. Whale-watching is one of the few human activities that contributes to the soundscape. By Morro Mico, on the southern limit of the Utría Natural National Park, an Ecological Acoustic Recorder (EAR, Oceanwide Science Institute) was deployed in the Gulf to record samples of acoustic activity from October to November 2018. It recorded for 10-min intervals with 20-min lapses for a duty cycle of 33.3%. One of the common peak frequencies of humpback whale song units from these recordings was used as input to an acoustic propagation model using the parabolic equation to simulate the communication space of a humpback whale when zero, one, and two boats are present. GPS positions of theodolite data from various whale watching scenarios in the Gulf were used to inform the models. Model results indicate that humpback whale song communication space could be reduced by as much as 63% in the presence of even one whale-watching boat. The boats...