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The attributes of male acoustic advertisement displays are often related to a performer's age, breeding condition and motivation, but these relationships are particularly difficult to study in free-ranging marine mammals. For fin whale singers, we examined the relationships between a singer's swimming speed, song duration and amount of singing. We used a unique set of fin whale singing and swimming data collected in support of the US Navy's marine mammal monitoring programme associated with the Navy's Integrated Undersea Surveillance System. A goal of the programme is to improve understanding of the potential effects of anthropogenic sound sources on baleen whale behaviours and populations. We found that as whales swam faster, some continued to sing, while others did not. If swimming speed is an indication of male stamina, then singing while swimming faster could be a display by which females and/or other males assess a singer's physical fitness and potential reproductive quality. Results have implications for interpreting fin whale singing behaviour and the possible influences of anthropogenic sounds on fin whale mating strategies and breeding success.

Figure_S1: Distribution of all inter-song-intervals (n = 7877) for 163 singers. The biexponential curve fit to the log frequency distribution was used to calculate the bout ending criteria (BEC) value of 35 minutes (intersection of the dashed line data with the x-axis). By this criterion, a singer sang multiple bouts if there was an inter-song-interval in his track 35 min.

The attributes of male acoustic advertisement displays are often related to a performer's age, breeding condition and motivation, but these relationships are particularly difficult to study in free-ranging marine mammals. For fin whale singers, we examined the relationships between a singer's swimming speed, song duration and amount of singing. We used a unique set of fin whale singing and swimming data collected in support of the US Navy's marine mammal monitoring programme associated with the Navy's Integrated Undersea Surveillance System. A goal of the programme is to improve understanding of the potential effects of anthropogenic sound sources on baleen whale behaviours and populations. We found that as whales swam faster, some continued to sing, while others did not. If swimming speed is an indication of male stamina, then singing while swimming faster could be a display by which females and/or other males assess a singer's physical fitness and potential reproductive quality. Results have implications for interpreting fin whale singing behaviour and the possible influences of anthropogenic sounds on fin whale mating strategies and breeding success.

Statistical data for fin whale singers based on 163 tracks of individual singers, for which there was a total of 1208 track segments. These 163 singers sang a total of 8040 songs, yielding a total of 7877 inter-song intervals (n = 8040 – 163).

This thesis expands the definition of queerness through exploring its oppositionality to norms of heteronormativity tied to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. Reading an interdisciplinary range of cultural texts, I consider the extent to which they can be deployed to provide a counternarrative to concepts of transcultural memory, nationalism, and citizenry following recent historical events, stemming from September 11, 2001. I begin by examining the impact of domestic responses to 9/11 through “vernacular” photography, demonstrating how nationalistic responses marginalize queer identities. Expanding out to explore the transnational effects of the “War on Terror”, my second chapter reads contemporary Iraq War fiction, revealing the queer rendering of bodies that finds a foothold through military occupations abroad. Third, I look to the extra-national sites of Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib to show the insidious extension of national borders, and norms, creating sites that are simultaneously intra- and extra-national. I argue that these sites operate as palimpsests of memory, crossing frontiers of the transnational, transcultural, and transhistorical. Finally, I look at the movement of queer bodies into the United States through migration narratives, returning to the ubiquitous sites of normativity within the country’s borders. My conclusion ties these strands together to understand how memorialization and cultural representations of historical events impact queer bodies and the cultural conditions of the US. I establish how these bodies affect, and are affected by, literal, figurative, and imaginative movements, and the implications for state discourse. Ultimately, I demonstrate the “Americanization” of globalization dictates how such bodies are conceptualized and is subsequently treated in other nations.

Whales are difficult to study. These large marine mammals cannot be maintained in captivity so they have to be studied in nature, and observing their underwater behavior becomes a challenge. The extensive distribution, large size, and aquatic life style of these leviathans constrain efforts to observe and understand the scale of what is being studied. Researchers have dealt with this challenge with wit, determination and creativity. Large whales are known for using long distance acoustic communication to coordinate social interactions such as mate attraction and group feeding, as well as a means for orientation and navigation. Therefore, sound is relied on to help “see” beyond the surface. Marine mammalogists were the first to modify existing technology from ocean bottom sensors to develop novel ways to listen underwater, taking advantage of the fact that these animals rely mostly on sound to survive and reproduce. In effect, biologists eavesdrop on the underwater lives of marine mammals by listening. Researchers listen to humpback whales using different passive acoustic technologies that span a variety of spatial and temporal scales. In this paper, studies conducted in Brazilian waters are reviewed, primarily in the Abrolhos Bank region, where basic and advanced technologies have been used to understand the acoustic ecology of this large marine mammal species. Male humpback whale culture, their social dynamics revealed by spatial and temporal vocal activity patterns, and their interaction with the encroaching noise generated by humans, are reviewed.

We aim to investigate advancing the state of the art of detection, classification and localization (DCL) in the field of bioacoustics. The two primary goals are to develop transferable technologies for detection and classification in: (1) the area of advanced algorithms, such as deep learning and other methods; and (2) advanced systems, capable of real-time and archival and processing. This project will focus on long-term, continuous datasets to provide automatic recognition, minimizing human time to annotate the signals. Effort will begin by focusing on several years of multi-channel acoustic data collected in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary (SBNMS) between 2006 and 2010. Our efforts will incorporate existing technologies in the bioacoustics signal processing community, advanced high performance computing (HPC) systems, and new approaches aimed at automatically detecting-classifying and measuring features for species-specific marine mammal sounds within passive acoustic data., Year 1 National Oceanic Partnership Program Report, sponsored ONR, NFWF. N000141210585

While the animal bioacoustics community at large is collecting huge amounts of acoustic data at an unprecedented pace, processing these data is problematic. Currently in bioacoustics, there is no effective way to achieve high performance computing using commericial off the shelf (COTS) or government off the shelf (GOTS) tools. Although several advances have been made in the open source and commercial software community, these offerings either support specific applications that do not integrate well with data formats in bioacoustics or they are too general. Furthermore, complex algorithms that use deep learning strategies require special considerations, such as very large libraiers of exemplars (whale sounds) readily available for algorithm training and testing. Detection-classification for passive acoustics is a data-mining strategy and our goals are aligned with best practices that appeal to the general data mining and machine learning communities where the problem of processing large data is common. Therefore, the objective of this work is to advance the state-of-the art for data-mining large passive acoustic datasets as they pertain to bioacoustics. With this basic deficiency recognized at the forefront, portions of the grant were dedicated to fostering deep-learning by way of international competitions (kaggle.com) meant to attract deep-learning solutions. The focus of this early work was targeted to make significant progress in addressing big data systems and advanced algorithms over the duration of the grant from 2012 to 2015. This early work provided simulataneous advances in systems-algorithms research while supporting various collaborations and projects., National Oceanic Partnership Program (NOPP) sponsored by ONR and NFWF

Goals of this research phase is to investigate advanced detection and classification pardims useful for data-mining passive large passive acoustic archives. Technical objectives are to develop and refine a High Performance Computing, Acoustic Data Accelerator (HPC-ADA) along with MATLAB based software based on time series acoustic signal Detection cLassification using Machine learning Algorithms, called DeLMA. Data scientists and biologists integrate to use the HPC-ADA and DeLMA technologies to explore data using newly developed techniques aimed at inspection of data extracted at large spatial and temporal scales., Comment: National Oceanic Partnership Program (NOPP) sponsored by ONR and NFWF

Overarching goals for this work aim to advance the state of the art for detection, classification and localization (DCL) in the field of bioacoustics. This goal is primarily achieved by building a generic framework for detection-classification (DC) using a fast, efficient and scalable architecture, demonstrating the capabilities of this system using on a variety of low-frequency mid-frequency cetacean sounds. Two primary goals are to develop transferable technologies for detection and classification in, one: the area of advanced algorithms, such as deep learning and other methods; and two: advanced systems, capable of real-time and archival processing. For each key area, we will focus on producing publications from this work and providing tools and software to the community where/when possible. Currently massive amounts of acoustic data are being collected by various institutions, corporations and national defense agencies. The long-term goal is to provide technical capability to analyze the data using automatic algorithms for (DC) based on machine intelligence. The goal of the automation is to provide effective and efficient mechanisms by which to process large acoustic datasets for understanding the bioacoustic behaviors of marine mammals. This capability will provide insights into the potential ecological impacts and influences of anthropogenic ocean sounds. This work focuses on building technologies using a maturity model based on DARPA 6.1 and 6.2 processes, for basic and applied research, respectively., Comment: National Oceanic Partnership Program (NOPP) sponsored by ONR and NFWF: N000141210585

This work presents a new toolkit for describing the acoustic properties of the ocean environment before, during and after a sound event caused by an underwater seismic air-gun. The toolkit uses existing sound measures, but uniquely applies these to capture the early time period (actual pulse) and late time period (reverberation and multiple arrivals). In total, 183 features are produced for each air-gun sound. This toolkit was utilized on data retrieved from a field deployment encompassing five marine autonomous recording units during a 46-day seismic air-gun survey in Baffin Bay, Greenland. Using this toolkit, a total of 147 million data points were identified from the Greenland deployment recordings. The feasibility of extracting a large number of features was then evaluated using two separate methods: a serial computer and a high performance system. Results indicate that data extraction performance took an estimated 216 hours for the serial system, and 18 hours for the high performance computer. This paper provides an analytical description of the new toolkit along with details for using it to identify relevant data., Comment: Camera copy version of the paper for publication in IEEE explore. Paper was withdrawn by the co-authors for submission to JASA Express Letters

El primer objetivo del trabajo tiene como fin describir el patrón de presencia estacional del rorcual común en las diferentes áreas de estudio a lo largo de la región occidental del mar Mediterráneo. La determinación de los meses de mayor y menor presencia de las ballenas en cada área de estudio permite contrastar si existe un patrón de presencia estacional en la región occidental del mar Mediterráneo. El segundo objetivo del trabajo tiene como fin confirmar y describir la presencia de un patrón migratorio estacional en la población del rorcual común en el Mediterráneo occidental. La comparación de los diferentes patrones de presencia estacional a lo largo de la región Mediterránea de la Península Ibérica permite contrastar si la población de rorcual común del mar Mediterráneo se desplaza hacia el norte en primavera y hacia el sur en otoño o si por el contrario no presenta un patrón migratorio estacional definido.