CCES 2018 Final Acoustic Report

The 2018 California Current Ecosystem Survey (CCES) was a multidisciplinary survey of the marine ecosystem from southern British Columbia, Canada to northern Baja California, Mexico. CCES 2018 was conducted from 26 June to 4 December 2018 aboard the NOAA ship Reuben Lasker. In this report we present the preliminary results of the passive acoustic monitoring efforts using DASBRs. DASBRs were first used in a broad-scale Passive Acoustics Survey of Cetacean Abundance Levels (PASCAL) in the California Current during 2016, (Keating et al., 2018). Acoustic recordings were analyzed to detect echolocation signals from beaked whales, sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus), and dwarf and pygmy sperm whales (Kogia spp.). In 2016, the most common beaked whale echolocation pulses were from Cuvier’s beaked whale (Ziphius cavirostris), Baird’s beaked whale (Berardius bairdii), Stejneger’s beaked whale (Mesoplodon stejnegeri), and two unidentified species of beaked whales whose echolocation pulses were referred to as BW43 and BW39V. Here we present analyses of the DASBR deployments from the CCES 2018 project.