Yvan Simard

Corrigendum: Krill diel vertical migration fine dynamics, nocturnal overturns, and their roles for aggregation in stratified flows

A set of high-resolution observations on short-term dynamics of krill diel vertical migrations (DVM) in the St. Lawrence Estuary are presented here, including vertical mass transfer measurements from multifrequency echosounding coupled with stratified net sampling and tracers of individual vertical movements from stomach pigments over a 72 h period. The data set is supplemented by vertical migration speeds and biomass diel patterns from ADCP (acoustic Doppler current profiler) time series lasting up to 3 months. All krill always rapidly migrated to the surface in synchrony at sunset. Soon after the ascent, fed krill started to swim downward. A scattering layer was then formed at their daytime depth with sometimes a significant backscatter at intermediate depths, especially around midnight. A reorganisation in the upper water column then occurs, likely for a predawn feeding bout. At dawn, the krill mass still feeding in upper water column synchronously swam downward to their daytime depth. This nocturnal asynchronous vertical behaviour, conforming to the DVM hunger-satiation hypothesis, repeated between August and October in two different years, the DVM timing being determined by day length. Résumé : Un ensemble d’observations à haute résolution de la dynamique à court terme des migrations verticales nycthémérales (MVN) du krill dans l’estuaire du Saint-Laurent est présenté. Il incorpore des mesures de transfert de masse sur la verticale à partir d’échosondages multifréquences couplés à l’échantillonnage des strates au filet à nappe et le suivi des mouvements verticaux individuels par des mesures de pigments stomacaux sur une période de 72 h. Des séries temporelles des patrons circadiens des vitesses verticales de migrations déterminées à l’aide d’un ADCP (« acoustic Doppler current profiler »; profileur de courant acoustique à effet Doppler) complètent les mésures sur une période allant jusqu’à 3 mois. L’ensemble du krill migre toujours rapidement et en synchronie jusqu’en surface lors du coucher du soleil. Peu de temps après l’ascension, du krill nourri commence à nager vers le bas, ce qui se poursuit avec une intensité notable jusqu’au milieu de la nuit. Il forme alors une couche acoustique de rétrodiffusion à sa profondeur diurne, ce qui engendre une distribution verticale nocturne bimodale, souvent accompagnée de densités acoustiques notables aux profondeurs intermédiaires, particulièrement au milieu de la nuit. Une réorganisation dans la partie supérieure de la colonne d’eau survient ensuite, vraisemblablement pour une dernière période d’alimentation avant l’aube. A l’aube, la masse de krill s’alimentant toujours dans la partie supérieure de la colonne d’eau nage en synchronie vers sa profondeur diurne. Ce comportement vertical nocturne asynchrone, conforme à l’hypothèse de faim-satiété de la MVN, s’est répété entre les mois d’août et d’octobre à deux années différentes, la synchronisation de la MVN dépendant de

Shipping noise in whale habitat: Characteristics, sources, budget, and impact on belugas in Saguenay–St. Lawrence Marine Park hub

A continuous car ferry line crossing the Saguenay Fjord mouth and traffic from the local whale-watching fleet introduce high levels of shipping noise in the heart of the Saguenay-St. Lawrence Marine Park. To characterize this noise and examine its potential impact on belugas, a 4-hydrophone array was deployed in the area and continuously recorded for five weeks in May-June 2009. The source levels of the different vessel types showed little dependence on vessel size or speed increase. Their spectral range covered 33 dB. Lowest noise levels occurred at night, when ferry crossing pace was reduced, and daytime noise peaked during whale-watching tour departures and arrivals. Natural ambient noise prevailed 9.4% of the time. Ferry traffic added 30-35 dB to ambient levels above 1 kHz during crossings, which contributed 8 to 14 dB to hourly averages. The whale-watching fleet added up to 5.6 dB during peak hours. Assuming no behavioral or auditory compensation, half of the time, beluga potential communication range was reduced to less than ~30% of its expected value under natural noise conditions, and to less than ~15% for one quarter of the time, with little dependence on call frequency. The echolocation band for this population of belugas was also affected by the shipping noise.

Krill diel vertical migration fine dynamics, nocturnal overturns, and their roles for aggregation in stratified flows (vol 65, pg 574, 2008)

A set of high-resolution observations on short-term dynamics of krill diel vertical migrations (DVM) in the St. Lawrence Estuary are presented here, including vertical mass transfer measurements from multifrequency echo sounding coupled with stratified net sampling and tracers of individual vertical movements from stomach pigments over a 72 h period. The data set is supplemented by vertical migration speeds and biomass diel patterns from ADCP (acoustic Doppler current profiler) time series lasting up to 3 months. All krill always rapidly migrated to the surface in synchrony at sunset. Soon after the ascent, fed krill started to swim downward. A scattering layer was then formed at their daytime depth with sometimes a significant backscatter at intermediate depths, especially around midnight. A reorganisation in the upper water column then occurs, likely for a predawn feeding bout. At dawn, the krill mass still feeding in upper water column synchronously swam downward to their daytime depth. This nocturnal ...

Under-ice ambient noise in Eastern Beaufort Sea, Canadian Arctic, and its relation to environmental forcing.

This paper analyzes an 8-month time series (November 2005 to June 2006) of underwater noise recorded at the mouth of the Amundsen Gulf in the marginal ice zone of the western Canadian Arctic when the area was >90% ice covered. The time-series of the ambient noise component was computed using an algorithm that filtered out transient acoustic events from 7-min hourly recordings of total ocean noise over a [0-4.1] kHz frequency band. Under-ice ambient noise did not respond to thermal changes, but showed consistent correlations with large-scale regional ice drift, wind speed, and measured currents in upper water column. The correlation of ambient noise with ice drift peaked for locations at ranges of ~300 km off the mouth of the Amundsen Gulf. These locations are within the multi-year ice plume that extends westerly along the coast in the Eastern Beaufort Sea due to the large Beaufort Gyre circulation. These results reveal that ambient noise in Eastern Beaufort Sea in winter is mainly controlled by the same meteorological and oceanographic forcing processes that drive the ice drift and the large-scale circulation in this part of the Arctic Ocean.

Automatic recognition of fin and blue whale calls for real-time monitoring in the St. Lawrence

Monitoring blue and fin whales summering in the St. Lawrence Estuary with passive acoustics requires call recognition algorithms that can cope with the heavy shipping noise of the St. Lawrence Seaway and with multipath propagation characteristics that generate overlapping copies of the calls. In this paper, the performance of three time-frequency methods aiming at such automatic detection and classification is tested on more than 2000 calls and compared at several levels of signal-to-noise ratio using typical recordings collected in this area. For all methods, image processing techniques are used to reduce the noise in the spectrogram. The first approach consists in matching the spectrogram with binary time-frequency templates of the calls (coincidence of spectrograms). The second approach is based on the extraction of the frequency contours of the calls and their classification using dynamic time warping (DTW) and the vector quantization (VQ) algorithms. The coincidence of spectrograms was the fastest method and performed better for blue whale A and B calls. VQ detected more 20 Hz fin whale calls but with a higher false alarm rate. DTW and VQ outperformed for the more variable blue whale D calls.

Analysis and modeling of 255 source levels of merchant ships from an acoustic observatory along St. Lawrence Seaway

An ensemble of 255 spectral source levels (SSLs) of merchant ships were measured with an opportunistic seaway acoustic observatory adhering to the American National Standards Institute/Acoustical Society of America S12.64-2009 standard as much as possible, and deployed in the 350-m deep lower St. Lawrence Seaway in eastern Canada. The estimated SSLs were sensitive to the transmission loss model. The best transmission loss model at the three measuring depths was an empirical in situ function for ranges larger than 300 m, fused with estimates from a wavenumber integration propagation model fed with inverted local geoacoustic properties for [300 to 1 m] ranges. Resulting SSLs still showed a high variability. Uni- and multi-variate analyses showed weak intermingled relations with ship type, length, breadth, draught, speed, age, and other variables. Cluster analyses distinguished six different SSL patterns, which did not correspond to distinctive physical characteristics of the ships. The broadband [20-500 Hz] source levels varied by 30 dB or more within all four 50-m length categories. Common SSL models based on frequency, length and speed failed to unbiasly replicate the observations. This article presents unbiased SSL models that explain 75%-88% of the variance using frequency, ship speed, and three other automatic identification system ship characteristics.

Blue whale calls classification using short-time Fourier and wavelet packet transforms and artificial neural network

Two new characterization methods based on the short-time Fourier and the wavelet packet transforms are proposed to classify blue whale calls. The vocalizations are divided into short-time overlapping segments before applying these transforms to each segment. Then, the feature vectors are constructed by computing the coefficient energies within two subbands in order to capture the AB phrase and D vocalization characteristics, respectively. Finally, a multilayer perceptron (MLP) is used to classify the vocalization into A, B and D classes. The proposed methods present high classification performance (86.25%) on the tested database.

Passive acoustic tomography: new concepts and applications using marine mammals: a review

This paper presents the new concept of passive acoustic tomography which allows ocean data collection with a passive acoustic remote sensing process. The originality lies in using acoustic sources of opportunity such as surface noise, radiated ship noise and marine mammal calls. Such use of passive tomography is a promising way to reduce acoustic emissions in oceans. A review is first presented, including the description of new concepts of covert active, assisted passive and autonomous tomography, followed by applications on real world data. Under the assumptions of multipath propagation and measurements performed by a sparse network of hydrophones, a time–frequency processor is proposed to simultaneously estimate the source location and the impulse response of the propagation channel for marine mammal calls used as opportunistic sources (multipath structure, time delay and attenuation are estimated). Promising results are obtained on real data coming from the Laurentian channel where wideband beluga calls (1 to 3 kHz) are measured by a sparse network of 6 bottom hydrophones.

Shipping noise and whales: World tallest ocean liner vs largest animal on earth

The noise spectra radiated by the world tallest ocean liner, the Queen Mary II (QM2), when she sailed over the blue whale feeding ground of the Saguenay - St. Lawrence Marine Park in Sept. and Oct. 2004 are presented. Recordings for her 4 transits were made from an array of AURAL autonomous hydrophones moored at mid water depth along the navigation corridor at the head of the Laurentian channel. Typical ship noise Lloyds mirror patterns on spectrogram generally allowed identification of the closest points of approach (CPA) to the hydrophones. The analysis of the Doppler shift of stable QM2 spectral rays allowed estimating CPA ranges and sailing speed. QM2 noise signature is characterized by several strong rays between ~100 to 500 Hz, likely from her propulsion pods. Her average noise spectra are however enclosed within the envelope of the merchant ship noise measured in the area, except for high peaks below 40 Hz and the above rays. Broadband (10-1000 Hz) rms levels varied from 121 to 136 dB re 1muPa. As for most other merchant ships, this radiated shipping noise makes a barrier masking the low-frequency vocalizations of calling blue and fin whales over a large part of the basin

Three-dimensional acoustic mapping and simulation of krill distribution in the Saguenay—St. Lawrence Marine Park whale feeding ground

Geostatistical conditional simulations are used to get a family of non-smoothed three-dimensional (3D) images of the St. Lawrence krill aggregation from echointegration data at 38 and 120 kHz on a systematic grid of transects. These maps respect the inherent patchiness of krill. Their ensemble gives an histogram of the krill density estimates at any point of the 3D grid, not only the mean density as in kriging. The spatially consistent simulations are conditional to match the observations and their histogram and variogram. The 3D problem is by-passed by transposing to a short series of 2D ones, which simplifies the modelling of the autocorrelation function and has the additional advantage of reducing by a factor of 5 the number of points to simulate. The spatially structured krill density profile is summarised by the first few factors of a principal component analysis, where the variables are the volume backscattering strength at 120 kHz for the integrated vertical bins along the profiles and the observations are the different profiles. The principal component scores are simulated over a 2D-grid and then used to reconstruct the full 3D-image. The method adequately reproduces the histogram, variogram and mean profile of krill density, and cross-validations replicate the observations. It is as precise as an alternative kriging approach to estimate the mean density, but has the additional advantages of requiring less computing time for our particular application. These conditional simulations enable estimating the probability density function of the krill density at any point, an essential information for predator-prey interactions and other ecosystem studies.