Abstract
A California sea lion performed a psychophysical auditory discrimination task with a set of six stimuli: three barks recorded from conspecific males and high-pass filtered versions of the barks that removed the majority of energy at fundamental frequencies. Discrimination performance and subject reaction times (RTs) suggested that the vocalizations were all perceived as fairly dissimilar. This preliminary study hints that low-frequency components are a salient part of the California sea lion bark despite elevation of this species’ aerial hearing thresholds and the potential for elevated environmental noise levels at frequencies below 1 kHz.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the animal care and training staff at the Navy Marine Mammal Program, San Diego, CA, and funding from the Office of Naval Research Marine Mammal and Biological Oceanography Program. We also thank Colleen Reichmuth, Guy Oliver, and Año Nuevo State Park for their assistance in obtaining the sea lion vocalizations. This work was approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at the Biosciences Division, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific.
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Mulsow, J., Finneran, J.J. (2016). Auditory Discrimination of Natural and High-Pass Filtered Bark Vocalizations in a California Sea Lion (Zalophus californianus). In: Popper, A., Hawkins, A. (eds) The Effects of Noise on Aquatic Life II. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 875. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2981-8_89
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2981-8_89
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