Animal-borne acoustic transceivers reveal patterns of at-sea associations in an upper-trophic level predator

Satellite telemetry data have substantially increased our understanding of habitat use and foraging behaviour of upper-trophic marine predators, but fall short of providing an understanding of their social behaviour. We sought to determine whether novel acoustic and archival GPS data could be used t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2012-11, Vol.7 (11), p.e48962
Main Authors: Lidgard, Damian C, Bowen, W Don, Jonsen, Ian D, Iverson, Sara J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustics
Animal behavior
Animals
Bathymetry
Behavior, Animal - physiology
Biology
Breeding
Breeding seasons
Ecology
Ecosystem
Feeding Behavior - physiology
Fisheries
Foraging behavior
Foraging habitats
Foreign banks
Gender differences
Global positioning systems
GPS
Grey seals
Habitat utilization
Halichoerus grypus
Laboratory animals
Marine mammals
Markov chains
Markov processes
Oceans and Seas
Predators
Prey
Satellite navigation systems
Seals
Seals, Earless - physiology
Social Behavior
Studies
Telemetry
Transceivers
Transmitters
Trophic levels
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Summary:Satellite telemetry data have substantially increased our understanding of habitat use and foraging behaviour of upper-trophic marine predators, but fall short of providing an understanding of their social behaviour. We sought to determine whether novel acoustic and archival GPS data could be used to examine at-sea associations among grey seals (Halichoerus grypus) during the fall foraging period. Fifteen grey seals from Sable Island, Canada were deployed with Vemco Mobile Transceivers and Satellite-GPS transmitters in October 2009, 13 of which were recaptured and units retrieved 79 ± 2.3 days later during the following breeding season, December 2009-January 2010. An association between two individuals was defined as a cluster of acoustic detections where the time between detections was
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0048962