Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Solomons, MD, USA.
Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA.
Sci Rep. 2020 Nov 6;10(1):19247. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-76077-3.
As storms become increasingly intense and frequent due to climate change, we must better understand how they alter environmental conditions and impact species. However, storms are ephemeral and provide logistical challenges that prevent visual surveys commonly used to understand marine mammal ecology. Thus, relatively little is known about top predators' responses to such environmental disturbances. In this study, we utilized passive acoustic monitoring to characterize the response of bottlenose dolphins to intense storms offshore Maryland, USA between 2015 and 2017. During and following four autumnal storms, dolphins were detected less frequently and for shorter periods of time. However, dolphins spent a significantly higher percentage of their encounters feeding after the storm than they did before or during. This change in foraging may have resulted from altered distributions and behavior of their prey species, which are prone to responding to environmental changes, such as varied sea surface temperatures caused by storms. It is increasingly vital to determine how these intense storms alter oceanography, prey movements, and the behavior of top predators.
由于气候变化，风暴变得越来越强烈和频繁，我们必须更好地了解它们如何改变环境条件和影响物种。然而，风暴是短暂的，并且存在物流方面的挑战，这使得我们无法使用通常用于了解海洋哺乳动物生态的视觉调查。因此，人们对这些环境干扰下顶级捕食者的反应知之甚少。在这项研究中，我们利用被动声学监测来描述 2015 年至 2017 年间美国马里兰州近海强风暴期间宽吻海豚的反应。在四次秋季风暴期间和之后，海豚被检测到的频率较低，持续时间较短。然而，海豚在风暴后的觅食时间比例明显高于风暴前或风暴期间。这种觅食方式的改变可能是由于其猎物的分布和行为发生了变化，这些猎物容易对环境变化做出反应，例如风暴引起的不同海面温度。确定这些强烈风暴如何改变海洋学、猎物的运动以及顶级捕食者的行为变得越来越重要。
