Study on diving behavior of sperm whales using suction cup attached TDR tag: an overview

概要

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Studies on diving behavior of marine mammals using data loggers including time depth recorders (TDR) are becoming popular these days. However, cetaceans, which do not come up to the land, have a difficulty in capturing the animal to attach these equipments. This has hindered wide usage of data loggers. Development of the method using suction cup to deploy the tag with data logger directly to swimming animals solved the problem accompanied with capture. We have applied this method to sperm whales off Japan. Sperm whales are thought to have a greatest diving ability among cetaceans but almost nothing is known about their diving behavior. We successfully deployed suction cup attached TDR tags to six whales off the Kumano Coast and the Ogasawara Islands without any intense reactions of the whales. All tags were recovered after they fell off using radio telemetry, and we obtained 1, 9, 13, 14, 17, and 62 hours of diving data. This method proved to be really feasible for studying diving behavior of sperm whales.
2003-03-28