Danuta Maria Wisniewska

French National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS · Chizé Center for Biological Studies

Visual predators rely on fast-acting optokinetic responses to track and capture agile prey. Most toothed whales, however, rely on echolocation for hunting and have converged on biosonar clicking rates reaching 500/s during prey pursuits. If echoes are processed on a click-by-click basis, as assumed, neural responses 100× faster than those in vision...

Bio-logging devices equipped with inertial measurement units—particularly accelerometers, magnetometers, and pressure sensors—have revolutionized our ability to study animals as necessary electronics have gotten smaller and more affordable over the last two decades. These animal-attached tags allow for fine scale determination of behavior in the ab...

Visual predators rely on fast-acting optokinetic reflexes to track and capture agile prey. Most toothed whales, however, rely on echolocation for hunting and have converged on biosonar clicking rates reaching 500/s during prey pursuits. If echoes are processed on a click-by-click basis, as assumed, neural responses 100x faster than those in vision...

Anthropogenic noise is a pervasive and increasing source of disturbance to wildlife. Marine mammals exhibit behavioural and physiological responses to naval sonar and other sound sources. The lost foraging opportunities and elevated locomotor effort associated with sonar disturbance likely carry energetic costs, which may lead to population‐level c...

Abstract Harbour porpoises frequently alter their behaviour in response to underwater sound from shipping, seismic surveys, drilling and marine renewables. Less well understood is the response of porpoises to sounds emitted from oil and gas (O&G) platforms during routine operations. The responses are not easily predicted as platforms can act simult...

Energy drives behaviour and life history decisions, yet it can be hard to measure at fine scales in free-moving animals. Accelerometry has proven a powerful tool to estimate energy expenditure, but requires calibration in the wild. This can be difficult in some environments, or for particular behaviours, and validations have produced equivocal resu...

It's the prey that matters Although many people think of dinosaurs as being the largest creatures to have lived on Earth, the true largest known animal is still here today—the blue whale. How whales were able to become so large has long been of interest. Goldbogen et al. used field-collected data on feeding and diving events across different types...

• The impact of anthropogenic noise on marine fauna is of increasing conservation concern with vessel noise being one of the major contributors. Animals that rely on shallow coastal habitats may be especially vulnerable to this form of pollution. • Very limited information is available on how much noise from ship traffic individual animals experien...

Seismic surveys increasingly operate in deeper Arctic waters with propagation conditions and marine mammal fauna different from the better-studied temperate, or shallow-water, regions. Using 31 calibrated sound recorders, we quantified noise contributions from four concurrent seismic surveys in Baffin Bay, Greenland, to estimate their potential imp...

Reliable estimates of field metabolic rates (FMRs) in wild animals are essential for quantifying their ecological roles, as well as for evaluating fitness consequences of anthropogenic disturbances. Yet, standard methods for measuring FMR are difficult to use on free-ranging cetaceans whose FMR may deviate substantially from scaling predictions usi...

Toothed whales are apex predators varying in size from 40-kg porpoises to 50-ton sperm whales that all forage by emitting high-amplitude ultrasonic clicks and listening for weak returning echoes [1, 2]. The sensory field of view of these echolocating animals depends on the characteristics of the biosonar signals and the morphology of the sound gene...

Microchiropteran bats and toothed whales are the only taxa to echolocate for prey. The two biosonar systems have evolved independently, in media with very different physical properties that determine the production, propagation, and reflection of sound, as well as the means and speeds with which the echolocating predators and their prey can move an...

Social delphinids employ a vocal repertoire of clicks for echolocation and whistles for communication. Conversely, the less social and acoustically cryptic harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) only produce narrow-band high-frequency (NBHF) clicks with properties that appear poorly suited for communication. Nevertheless, these small odontocetes lik...

Shipping is the dominant marine anthropogenic noise source in the world's oceans, yet we know little about vessel encounter rates, exposure levels and behavioural reactions for cetaceans in the wild, many of which rely on sound for foraging, communication and social interactions. Here, we used animal-borne acoustic tags to measure vessel noise expo...

Sperm whales produce codas for communication that can be grouped into different types according to their temporal patterns. Codas have led researchers to propose that sperm whales belong to distinct cultural clans, but it is presently unclear if they also convey individual information. Coda clicks comprise a series of pulses and the delay between p...

The question of how individuals acquire and allocate resources to maximize fitness is central in evolutionary ecology. Basic information on prey selection, search effort, and capture rates are critical for understanding a predator's role in its ecosystem and for predicting its response to natural and anthropogenic disturbance. Yet, for most marine...

Sperm whales produce stereotyped click series, called codas, for communication that can be grouped into different types according to their temporal patterns. These distinctive phonations have led researchers to propose that sperm whales belong to distinct cultural clans, but it is presently unclear if they also convey individual information for com...

The Azores supported a sperm whaling industry for over one century and presently host a growing whale watching industry that mainly targets this species. Despite the lower productivity in relation to other coastal areas, the waters around the Azores are one important feeding ground for the species in the North Atlantic. Yet, very little is known ab...

In recent years, several sound and movement recording tags have been developed to sample the acoustic field experienced by cetaceans and their reactions to it. However, little is known about how tag placement and an animal's orientation in the sound field affect the reliability of on-animal recordings as proxies for actual exposure. Here, we quanti...

Cetaceans rely critically on sound for navigation, foraging and communication and are therefore potentially affected by increasing noise levels from human activities at sea. Shipping is the main contributor of anthropogenic noise underwater, but studies of shipping noise effects have primarily considered baleen whales due to their good hearing at l...

LabVIEW (2012 version) source code files for the National Instruments PXIE-6358 system, sampling 48 AD channels at 500 kHz/channel. An independent multifunction USB device (National Instruments USB-6251) delivered a trigger pulse for the PXIE system alongside a high-frequency pulse (a frequency-modulated sweep) that was transmitted into the water t...

Toothed whales use sonar to detect, locate, and track prey. They adjust emitted sound intensity, auditory sensitivity and click rate to target range, and terminate prey pursuits with high-repetition-rate, low-intensity buzzes. However, their narrow acoustic field of view (FOV) is considered stable throughout target approach, which could facilitate...

Wahlberg and his colleagues explore the concept of Umwelt, the comprehensive picture of the world an animal forms from all of its senses as it relates to the acoustic abilities of the harbor porpoise. This close connection has allowed them to tease out details of how the animals produce sounds, as well as how they hear and echolocate simultaneously...

Echolocating bats and toothed whales probe their environment with ultrasonic sound pulses, using returning echoes to navigate and find prey in a process that appears to have resulted from a remarkable convergence of the two taxa. Here we report the first detailed quantification of echolocation behaviour during prey capture in the most studied delph...

In 2012 one 2D and three 3D seismic surveys were simultaneously conducted in Baffin Bay, West Greenland. The surveys were monitored using 21 acoustic dataloggers deployed in and around the seismic sites and CTD data were collected throughout the seismic season. These environmental data together with bathymetry measurements collected by the seismic...

A key component in understanding the ecological role of marine mammal predators is to identify how, where and how much prey they capture in time and space. Satellite and archival tags on pinnipeds generally only provide diving and positioning information, and foraging is often inferred to take place in particular shaped dives or when the animal rem...

Toothed whales produce sound in their nasal complex by pneumatic actuation of phonic lip pairs within the blowhole. It has been hypothesized that dual actuation of the phonic lip pairs can generate two pulses that merge to form a single echolocation click with a higher source level, broader bandwidth and larger potential for beam steering than if p...

Visually dominant animals use gaze adjustments to organize perceptual inputs for cognitive processing. Thereby they manage the massive sensory load from complex and noisy scenes. Echolocation, as an active sensory system, may provide more opportunities to control such information flow by adjusting the properties of the sound source. However, most s...

Studying the behavior of aquatic echolocators and their prey has proved to be challenging. However, recent studies using Dtags on several toothed whale species in the wild have identified sequences of echoes interpreted as stemming from ensonified prey, along with accelerometer signatures possibly indicative of feeding events. The present study aim...

Echolocating toothed whales produce high-powered clicks by pneumatic actuation of phonic lips in their nasal complexes. All non-physeteroid toothed whales have two pairs of phonic lips allowing many of these species to produce both whistles and clicks at the same time. That has led to the hypothesis that toothed whales can increase the power output...