Heather Foley

Duke University Marine Lab · Read Lab

Marine mammals are known to respond to various human noises, including and in certain cases, strongly, to military active sonar. Responses include small and short-term changes in diving behavior, horizontal avoidance of an ensonified area, and mass strandings. Considerable research has been conducted using short-term biologging tags to understand t...

Some humpback whales from the Northwestern Atlantic population forgo migration to the Caribbean, spending winter months feeding along the U.S. mid‐Atlantic coast. We studied the foraging behavior of these whales at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, Virginia during winter from 2017 to 2022. While shipping channels here reach depths of up to 30 m, mos...

Aerobic dive limits (ADLs) are a useful paradigm for assessing marine mammal diving ability. Given the allometry of total body oxygen stores and metabolic rate, larger animals should have increased diving capacities and thus elevated ADLs. The short-finned pilot whale Globicephala macrorhynchus is a deep-diving species with pronounced sexual size d...

Background Animal-borne telemetry instruments (tags) have greatly advanced our understanding of species that are challenging to observe. Recently, non-recoverable instruments attached to cetaceans have increased in use, but these devices have limitations in data transmission bandwidth. We analyze trade-offs in the longevity, resolution, and continu...

Predators adapt their foraging behavior to exploit a variety of prey in a range of environments. Short-finned pilot whales are wide-ranging predators in tropical and sub-tropical oceans, but most previous studies of their foraging ecology have been conducted near oceanic islands. We deployed sound- and movement-recording tags on 43 short-finned pil...

Background Animal-borne telemetry instruments (tags) have greatly advanced our understanding of species that are challenging to observe. Recently, non-recoverable instruments attached to cetaceans have increased in use, but these devices have limitations in data transmission bandwidth. We analyze trade-offs in the longevity, resolution, and continu...

Studies of the social behavior of Cuvier's beaked whales (Ziphius cavirostris) are challenging because of their deep‐water habitat usually far from shore and the limited time they spend at the surface. The sociality of these deepest diving mammals is of interest, however, especially for our understanding of how social systems evolve in extreme habi...

Cuvier’s beaked whales Ziphius cavirostris are wide-ranging, deep-diving cetaceans that are particularly sensitive to anthropogenic noise. Current stock assessments assume a single population in the western North Atlantic Ocean, but knowledge of the residency patterns and distribution of the species is currently lacking in the region. Here we descr...

Cuvier's beaked whales exhibit exceptionally long and deep foraging dives. The species is little studied due to their deep-water, offshore distribution and limited time spent at the surface. We used LIMPET satellite tags to study the diving behaviour of Cuvier's beaked whales off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina from 2014 to 2016. We deployed 11 tags,...

Shelf break systems are ecologically important regions of the ocean, and are often characterized by enhanced productivity and high densities of species from lower to upper trophic levels. Along with associated submarine canyons, shelf break regions provide important foraging habitat for deep-diving odontocetes such as pilot whales. Short-finned pil...