1. Australian Antarctic Data Centre
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4. AAS_4102_2015_New_Zealand_Australia_Antarctic_Ecosystems_Voyage

Description

This metadata record is a parent for all data on Antarctic blue whales collected during the 2015 New Zealand-Australia Antarctic Ecosystems Voyage. Description of specific data sets can be found in the Voyage Science Plan and within child datasets.

Purpose

The New Zealand-Australia Antarctic Ecosystems Voyage was a 42-day research expedition to the Ross Sea region between the 29 January and 11 March 2015. The focus of the voyage was multidisciplinary ecological studies of marine foodwebs of importance to top predators. This dataset primarily describes the research related to the Antarctic Blue Whale Project of the IWC-Southern Ocean Research Partnership. Two phases of blue whale research occurred during the voyage (8-14 February and 24 February-2 March). During these periods the ship’s position was guided by bearings to calling blue whales detected using DIFAR sonobuoys. Over the voyage 310 sonobuoys were deployed that detected over 40,000 individual blue whale calls over 520 hours of recordings. These calls identified 4,000 triangulated positions of calling blue whales. There was a marked increase in the rate of blue whale calling after 8 February. Total visual sightings effort was 467 hours yielding a total of 480 sightings of approximately 1297 cetaceans, including 29 confirmed sightings of approximately 81 Antarctic blue whales. Photo-identification data were collected from 58 blue whales. The acoustic and visual data suggest the blue whales were very strongly aggregated in a region approximately centred around 69 S, 178 W. Photogrammetry was used to describe the behaviour of the blue whales and active acoustic surveys, meso-pelagic trawling and oceanographic data were collected to describe the prey field and habitat characteristics of the blue whale aggregation. Preliminary analyses of the active acoustic surveys suggest the blue whale aggregation was associated with an area populated by very dense but patchily distributed krill swarms at depths less than 100 m.

Quality

See the child records for more information.

Access

See the child records for access to the data. A copy of the cruise report is publicly available for download from the provided URL.

Temporal Coverages

• Start date: 2015-01-29 - Stop date: 2015-03-11

Spatial Coverages

Science Keywords

• EARTH SCIENCE > BIOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION > ANIMALS/VERTEBRATES > MAMMALS > CETACEANS
• EARTH SCIENCE > BIOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION > ANIMALS/VERTEBRATES > MAMMALS > CETACEANS
• EARTH SCIENCE > OCEANS > OCEAN ACOUSTICS > AMBIENT NOISE
• EARTH SCIENCE > BIOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION > ANIMALS/INVERTEBRATES > ARTHROPODS > CRUSTACEANS
• EARTH SCIENCE > BIOSPHERE > ECOLOGICAL DYNAMICS > ECOSYSTEM FUNCTIONS > FOOD-WEB DYNAMICS
• EARTH SCIENCE > AGRICULTURE > ANIMAL SCIENCE > ANIMAL ECOLOGY AND BEHAVIOR

Use Constraints

This dataset has been collected under the International Whaling Commission’s (IWC) Southern Ocean Research Partnership (SORP). The IWC-SORP ethos is one of open collaboration, communication and data sharing. The Data User will acknowledge the use of the IWC SORP dataset by the following statement:
Data provided by the International Whaling Commission’s Southern Ocean Research Partnership were all based upon non-lethal samples collected under a protocol approved by the Australian Antarctic Program Animal Ethics Committee (AAPAEC). These data were provided by the Partnership for the purpose of collaborative investigation.


This data set conforms to the CCBY Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Please follow instructions listed in the citation reference provided at http://data.aad.gov.au/aadc/metadata/citation.cfm?entry_id=AAS_4102_2015_New_Zealand_Australia_Antarctic_Ecosystems_Voyage when using these data.