Publications by authors named "Patricia Arranz"
Article Synopsis
- Global warming is affecting marine species, altering their composition and distribution due to changes in ocean temperatures, acidity, and oxygen levels.
- Experts created thermal suitability curves to predict how different cetacean species in the North Atlantic may respond to future climate scenarios, since traditional experiments can't be conducted on wide-ranging marine predators.
- The study found that thermal suitability is expected to increase for some species like Balaenoptera edeni and Tursiops truncatus, while it will decline for others like B. physalus and Delphinus delphis, providing valuable insights for conservation efforts.
Echolocating animals that forage in social groups can potentially benefit from eavesdropping on other group members, cooperative foraging or social defence, but may also face problems of acoustic interference and intra-group competition for prey. Here, we investigate these potential trade-offs of sociality for extreme deep-diving Blainville's and Cuvier's beaked whales. These species perform highly synchronous group dives as a presumed predator-avoidance behaviour, but the benefits and costs of this on foraging have not been investigated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFear of predation can induce profound changes in the behaviour and physiology of prey species even if predator encounters are infrequent. For echolocating toothed whales, the use of sound to forage exposes them to detection by eavesdropping predators, but while some species exploit social defences or produce cryptic acoustic signals, deep-diving beaked whales, well known for mass-strandings induced by navy sonar, seem enigmatically defenceless against their main predator, killer whales. Here we test the hypothesis that the stereotyped group diving and vocal behaviour of beaked whales has benefits for abatement of predation risk and thus could have been driven by fear of predation over evolutionary time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- Humans have a strong ability to remember past experiences to help them plan for the future, and this study explores whether animals, specifically Risso's dolphins, demonstrate similar planning skills when foraging for food in the wild.
- The researchers equipped the dolphins with special tags to track their echolocation behavior and combined this data with information from echosounders, revealing how dolphins adjust their searching strategies based on the availability and quality of prey.
- Findings showed that dolphins use spatial memory from previous dives to make informed decisions about where and how to forage in subsequent dives, indicating an advanced level of planning in response to their environment.
Simultaneous high resolution sampling of predator behavior and habitat characteristics is often difficult to achieve despite its importance in understanding the foraging decisions and habitat use of predators. Here we tap into the biosonar system of Blainville's beaked whales, Mesoplodon densirostris, using sound and orientation recording tags to uncover prey-finding cues available to echolocating predators in the deep-sea. Echolocation sounds indicate where whales search and encounter prey, as well as the altitude of whales above the sea-floor and the density of organisms around them, providing a link between foraging activity and the bio-physical environment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF