Year-Round Acoustic Presence of Beaked Whales (Ziphiidae) Far Offshore off Australia’s Northwest Shelf

Beaked whales are a cryptic pelagic species, rarely sighted at sea. In a ~2.5-year passive acoustic monitoring program on Australia’s Northwest Shelf, a variety of marine mammal sounds were detected, including beaked whale (Ziphiidae) clicks. An automatic detection routine for beaked whale clicks was developed, tested, and run on these recordings. The detection workflow included: (1) the extraction of impulsive signals from passive acoustic recordings based on an auto-regression model, (2) the calculation of a set of features of extracted signals, and (3) binary signal classification based on these features. Detector performance (Precision, Recall, and F1-score) was assessed using a manually annotated dataset of extracted clicks. This automated routine allows for quick analysis of animal (acoustic) presence and distribution spatially and temporally. In our study, beaked whales were present all year round at six deep-water (>1000 m) sites, but no clicks were detected at the shallow-water (~70 m) site. No seasonal or diurnal patterns of beaked whale clicks were identified.