EAGER: Collaborative Research: Acoustic Ecology of Foraging Antarctic Blue Whales in the Vicinity of Antarctic Krill

We detected, tracked and localized blue whales and mapped prey fields in the vicinity of a fixed acoustic mooring that combined passive and active acoustics for collection of concurrent predator and prey data.

By coupling moored data collection with the ship-based survey focusing on Antarctic blue whale behaviour and krill dynamics, we investigated the dynamics of blue whales and their prey. We found that the production of social calls, D calls of blue whales and 40 Hz calls of fin whales, was correlated with the krill biomass over a week-long period.