Whistles of Indo-Pacific Humpback Dolphins (Sousa chinensis)

摘要

Whistles play an important role in Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins' social interactions, and function as individual identifiers. Therefore the investigation of their whistles will be beneficial for acoustic monitoring and for estimating their seasonal occurrence and abundance, which will be one of the very basic requirements for successful management of Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins. In this paper, whistles of Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins recorded in Leizhou Bay, Guangdong Province were analyzed. Five parameters of Indo-Pacific Humpback Dolphin whistles, which included time duration, starting and ending frequencies, minimum and maximum frequencies, were extracted through time-frequency analysis. Comparison of the whistles of Indo-Pacific Humpback Dolphins in Leizhou Bay, China and in the waters of Queensland, Australian showed that the whistle parameters of the two types of dolphins varied significantly.