Interpreting Deep Sea Behavior of Beaked Whales Using Hydrophone Recordings

Abstract

Beaked whales are a group of species that are understudied due to the difficulty of observing them in their natural habitat. Passive acoustic monitoring systems are one way of collecting information about beaked whales; however, these have the drawback that they do not collect much specific information about the behavior of the whales. In this paper, I attempt to add to the process of using passive acoustic monitoring systems to localize the whale as it dives. I do this by creating a program to account for localization issues due to measurement error through the use of a localization system that combines the measurements with a model of whale movement to get more realistic whale tracking information. While this program was not successful in improving the system of using only the measurements, I was able to identify some key issues that would need to be addressed to make a usable localization program that combines a model with the measurements.