Vocalizations of male bearded seals, Erignathus barbatus: classification and geographical variation
Section snippets
Sampling Procedures and Measurements
We obtained recordings of male bearded seals from four sites during the April–June mating season of this species. At each site recordings were acquired over several years between 1972 and 2001 in Alaska (1985, 1992–1993, 2000–2001), Svalbard (1999–2000), western Canadian Arctic (1972–1975) and the Canadian High Arctic (1976, 1981–1982; Fig. 1, Appendix Table A1). The Alaska and Svalbard recordings were each acquired at a single location (Point Barrow, Alaska and Kongsfjorden, Svalbard), whereas
Vocal Classification
We analysed a total of 3835 vocalizations for Alaska (N = 2319), Svalbard (N = 833), the Canadian High Arctic (N = 530) and the western Canadian Arctic (N = 153). We initially divided vocalizations into four basic call categories by visual inspection of the sound spectrogram: trill (T), moan (M), sweep (S) and ascent (A). The names of these categories are consistent with those used in earlier studies on bearded seal vocalizations (Cleator et al., 1989, Budelsky, 1992, Van Parijs et al., 2001). For each
Discussion
The comparison of bearded seal vocal repertoires throughout the four Arctic study sites revealed macrogeographical variation on the level of shared call categories and in vocal structure. Repertoires differed in readily discernible ways, either through the presence of certain call categories (e.g. the sweep vocalization was present only in Svalbard and the Canadian High Arctic; Fig. 3) or through structural differences in shared call types. Van Parijs et al., 2003a, Van Parijs et al., 2004
Acknowledgments
We thank the numerous people who, over the years, helped with recording in the field, especially G. N. Ahmaogak, Sr, T. Albert, T. Hepa and C. D. N. Brower of the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management for their steadfast support (Alaska); B. Krafft (Svalbard); H. Cleator, W. Calvert and D. Andriashek (Canadian Arctic). We are grateful to D. Ponirakis, M. Fowler and S. Smith for their help with digitizing the Alaskan and Canadian recordings. We thank the Alaska Eskimo Whaling
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- 1
C. W. Clark and P. J. Corkeron are at the Bioacoustics Research Program, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Road, Ithaca, NY 14850-1999, U.S.A.
- 2
A. Elepfandt is at the Institut für Biologie, Humboldt-Universität Berlin, Invalidenstr. 43, 10115 Berlin, Germany.
- 3
K. M. Kovacs and C. Lydersen are at the Norwegian Polar Institute, N-9296 Tromsø, Norway.
- 4
I. Stirling is at the Canadian Wildlife Service, 5320 122 Street, Edmonton, AB T6H 3S5, Canada.
- 5
S. M. Van Parijs is at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, 166 Water Street, Woods Hole, MA 02543-1026, U.S.A.