Mats Amundin

• PhD
• Senior advisor at Kolmarden Wildlife Park

Incidental bycatch in gillnet fisheries is considered one of the main threats to harbor porpoise populations worldwide. Such bycatch is depending on several factors, including biotic factors such as porpoise distribution and behaviour, as well as factors related to the characteristics of the fisheries. One porpoise bycatch mitigation method proven...

Habitat heterogeneity is a crucial driver for species distribution across scales. Harbour porpoise Phocoena phocoena basin-wide distribution is linked to prey availability, and small-scale (kilometres to tens of kilometres) differences in distribution are prevalent. However, information on porpoise distribution and foraging-behaviour variations on...

Franciscana dolphins in Babitonga Bay represent the only fully estuarine population of this critically endangered species, but this location is also home to a population of Guiana dolphins. Surrounded by large cities and harbors, Babitonga Bay presents intense human activities and potential impacts that may threaten the dolphins. Understanding thei...

Franciscana dolphins in Babitonga Bay represent the only population of that critically endangered species which is confined to an estuary. Surrounded by large cities and harbors, that environment presents intense human activities and potential impacts that may threaten the dolphins. Understanding their habitat use and distribution can inform mitiga...

Abstract Knowing the abundance of a population is a crucial component to assess its conservation status and develop effective conservation plans. For most cetaceans, abundance estimation is difficult given their cryptic and mobile nature, especially when the population is small and has a transnational distribution. In the Baltic Sea, the number of...

The franciscana (Pontoporia blainvillei) is the most endangered dolphin in the western South Atlantic Ocean due to bycatch. Our goal was to test the efficiency of a likely "seal safe" pinger (Banana Pinger, Fishtek Marine Ltd.) to ward off fran-ciscanas, as well as investigating possible side effects of habit-uation and habitat exclusion. We deploy...

Environmental and ecological factors can trigger changes in the acoustic repertoire of cetaceans. This study documents the first use of a well-established passive acoustic monitoring device (C-POD) to analyze echolocation sounds and behavior of franciscana dolphins in different habitats: estuary [Babitonga Bay (BB)] and open sea [Itapirubá Beach (I...

A measure proven successful in mitigating harbor porpoise bycatch, is the use of acoustic deterrents, i.e., pingers. However, most pingers are audible to seals. This may lead to seals associating pinger sounds with easily accessible food, leading to increased depredation, damage, and bycatch. In this study we tested if an experimental pinger, emitt...

Knowing the abundance of a population is a crucial component to assess its conservation status and develop effective conservation plans. For most cetaceans, abundance estimation is difficult given their cryptic and mobile nature, especially when the population is small and has a transnational distribution. In the Baltic Sea, the number of harbour p...

Meerkats (Suricata suricatta) are known to strongly rely on chemical signals for social communication. However, little is known about their use of the sense of smell in foraging and food detection. The aim of the present study was therefore to assess whether captive meerkats are able to (1) detect hidden food using olfactory cues alone, (2) discrim...

Knowledge on spatial and seasonal distribution of species is crucial when designing protected areas and implementing management actions. The Baltic Proper harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) population is critically endangered, and its distribution is virtually unknown. Here, we used passive acoustic monitoring and species distribution models to d...

It is well-established that the odor of mammalian blood is attractive to top predators such as tigers and wolves and aversive to prey species such as mice and rats. Recent studies have shown that the mammalian blood odor component trans-4,5-epoxy-(E)-2-decenal (TED) elicits corresponding behavioral responses in these two groups of mammals. Here we...

Chemosignals are used by predators to localize prey and by prey to avoid predators. These cues vary between species, but the odor of blood seems to be an exception and suggests the presence of an evolutionarily conserved chemosensory cue within the blood odor mixture. A blood odor component, E2D, has been shown to trigger approach responses identic...

experimental project to study dolphin communicative behaviour using distributional semantics, with methods implemented for the large scale study of human language.

This paper gives a brief introduction to the starting points of an experimental project to study dolphin communicative behaviour using distributional semantics, with methods implemented for the large scale study of human language.

Primates have been found to differ widely in their taste perception and studies suggest that a co-evolution between plant species bearing a certain taste substance and primate species feeding on these plants may contribute to such between-species differences. Considering that only platyrrhine primates, but not catarrhine or prosimian primates, shar...

Experts survey the latest research on dolphin communication and cognition, offering a comprehensive reference to findings in the laboratory and from the field. Dolphin researchers have collected an impressive amount of data over the last twenty years, thanks to advances in technology for monitoring, recording, and analyzing dolphin behavior as well...

The Swedish wolf population (Canis lupus) descends from five individuals and is isolated and highly inbred with an average inbreeding coefficient of 0.27. In addition, inbreeding depression has led to reduced litter size and a high frequency of spinal disorders. To achieve the management goal of reducing the mean level of inbreeding, introductions...

Nonhuman primates differ widely in various aspects of their ecology and are thus particularly suitable for studying the mechanisms underlying interspecies differences in taste perception. Therefore, we assessed taste preference thresholds as well as relative preferences for five food-associated sugars in three adult black-and-white ruffed lemurs (V...

Managing animal units is essential in biological conservation and requires spatial and temporal identification of such units. Since even neighbouring populations often have different conservation status and face different levels of anthropogenic pressure, detailed knowledge of population structure, seasonal range and overlap with animals from neigh...

t is not generally possible to determine acoustically how far a vocalising cetacean is from from a single hydrophone, but landmark sequences do make this possible. These sequences occur in the click trains made by porpoises, and show a linear reduction over time in the interval between the clicks as the animal swims towards a target of interest to...

Cross-fostering in canids, with captive-bred pups introduced into endangered wild populations, might aid conservation efforts by increasing genetic diversity and lowering the risk of inbreeding depression. The gray wolf (Canis lupus lupus) population in Scandinavia suffers from severe inbreeding due to a narrow genetic base and geographical isolati...

Only little is known about whether single volatile compounds are as efficient in eliciting behavioral responses in animals as the whole complex mixture of a behaviorally relevant odor. Recent studies analysing the composition of volatiles in mammalian blood, an important prey-associated odor stimulus for predators, found the odorant trans-4,5-epoxy...

SAMBAH (Static Acoustic Monitoring of the Baltic Sea Harbor Porpoise) is an EU LIFE + -funded project with the primary goal of estimating the abundance and distribution of the critically endangered Baltic Sea harbor porpoise. From May 2011 to April 2013, project members in all EU countries around the Baltic Sea undertook a static acoustic survey us...

Dogs' substantial socio-cognitive abilities are well known, especially those relating to human-dog communication. Studies indicate that dogs also acquire some information from the emotional expressions of humans. Our test aimed to investigate whether dogs base their choice on the owners' emotional expression in a three-way object-choice test. In ou...

The harbour porpoises kept at the Fjord & Bælt since April 1997 offer a unique opportunity to gain a better understanding of the reproductive function in harbour porpoises, especially in terms of physiological cycle and concomitant behavioural traits. A study was initiated in 1997 with the following aims: 1) characterising the annual reproductive c...

Using a food-rewarded two-choice instrumental conditioning paradigm, we assessed the ability of Asian elephants, Elephas maximus, to discriminate between 2 sets of structurally related odorants. We found that the animals successfully discriminated between all 12 odor pairs involving members of homologous series of aliphatic 1-alcohols, n-aldehydes,...

Using a food-rewarded two-choice instrumental conditioning paradigm we assessed the ability of South African fur seals, Arctocephalus pusillus, to discriminate between 12 enantiomeric odor pairs. The results demonstrate that the fur seals as a group were able to discriminate between the optical isomers of carvone, dihydrocarvone, dihydrocarveol, me...

Monitoring abundance and population trends of small odontocetes is notoriously difficult and labor intensive. There is a need to develop alternative methods to the traditional visual line transect surveys, especially for low density areas. Here, the prospect of obtaining robust density estimates for porpoises by passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is...

Pile driving of large steel monopiles in offshore waters has increased rapidly in recent years due to the expanding development of offshore wind energy. In particular, Phocoena phocoena (harbor porpoise) has been the focus of attention with respect to a possible negative impact. Impact pile driving, where a large steel monopile is driven 20-30 m in...

The European Union’s (EU) Marine Strategy Framework Directive (2008/56/EC) aims to improve the condition of all Europe’s seas and ensure that human usage of these seas is sustainable. The directive will work by requiring EU member states to set a series of objectives for 11 Descriptors of Environmental Status. One of these descriptors, Introduction...

The present study demonstrates that Asian elephants, Elephas maximus, can successfully be trained to cooperate in an olfactory discrimination test based on a food-rewarded two-alternative instrumental conditioning procedure. The animals learned the basic principle of the test within only 60 trials and readily mastered intramodal stimulus transfer t...

Recordings of the acoustic activity of free-swimming groups of echolocating dolphins increase the likelihood of collecting overlapping click trains, originating from multiple individuals, in the same set of data. In order to evaluate the click properties of each individual based on such recordings it is necessary to identify which clicks originate...

Animated GIF for Figure 20. This animation shows the 53rd natural mode of vibration (92.5 kHz). It illustrates the nature of the “counterbalancing” or “compensating” motions of sigmoid process and the medial sulcus of the mallear ridge. (1.18 MB GIF)

Animated GIF for Figure 21. This animation shows the 56th natural mode of vibration (96.7 kHz). The vibrational patterns continue to get more complex as frequency increases. (1.19 MB GIF)

Animated GIF for Figure 30. In this view, the TPC has been turned upside down and the medial side removed so that the middle ear ossicles are visible for the 64th natural mode of vibration (105.7 kHz). This example shows that the ossicles move with multiple extreme twisting motions with respect to one another. (0.81 MB GIF)

Animated GIF for Figure 31. In this view, the TPC has been turned upside down and the medial side removed so that the middle ear ossicles are visible for the 68th natural mode of vibration (109.3 kHz). This example shows that the ossicles move with different twisting trajectories with respect to previous examples. (0.72 MB GIF)

Animated GIF for Figure 34. In this view, the TPC has been turned upside down and the medial side removed so that the middle ear ossicles are visible for the 105th natural mode of vibration (146.4 kHz). This example shows the most extreme twisting displacements of the ossicles. (0.80 MB GIF)

Animated GIF for Figure 18. This animation shows the 33rd natural mode of vibration (65.5 kHz). Note that some of the largest displacements occur in the medial sulcus of the mallear ridge. In addition, the adjacent sigmoid process is similarly active. (1.11 MB GIF)

Animated GIF for Figure 25. In this view, the TPC has been turned upside down and the medial side removed so that the middle ear ossicles are visible. This animation shows the relatively small motions of ossicles for the 11th natural mode of vibration (32.1 kHz). (0.73 MB GIF)

Animated GIF for Figure 32. In this view, the TPC has been turned upside down and the medial side removed so that the middle ear ossicles are visible for the 79th natural mode of vibration (122.3 kHz). In this example the malleus and incus are once again moving in unison with one another. (0.77 MB GIF)

Details on the formulation of the model. (0.06 MB DOC)

Animated GIF for Figure 17. At this first natural mode of vibration (8.1 kHz), the motion is large, low-frequency swinging movements. (1.09 MB GIF)

Animated GIF for Figure 19. This animation shows the 40th natural mode of vibration (76.8 kHz). As the frequency rises, the wavelength gets smaller, allowing a greater number of complete cycles (peaks and valleys) to be supported across the TPC. (1.18 MB GIF)

Animated GIF for Figure 24. This animation shows the 117th natural mode of vibration (157.8 kHz) for this Tursiops truncatus TPC. This frequency is at the upper end of the useable acoustic range for this species, according to the literature. It is also nearly the highest mode we calculated for this TPC. (1.21 MB GIF)

Animated GIF for Figure 29. In this view, the TPC has been turned upside down and the medial side removed so that the middle ear ossicles are visible for the 56th natural mode of vibration (96.7 kHz). This example shows that the ossicles move with more exaggerated twisting motions with respect to one another. (0.79 MB GIF)

Animated GIF for Figure 22. This animation shows the 63rd natural mode of vibration (104.8 kHz). It is interesting to observe that the higher frequencies are associated with relatively larger amplitudes of motion across the stapes (see Figure 36). One may conjecture that a mechanism like this may have evolved to compensate for the attenuation of hi...

Animated GIF for Figure 23. This animation shows the 65th natural mode of vibration (107.5 kHz). (1.18 MB GIF)

Animated GIF for Figure 26. In this view, the TPC has been turned upside down and the medial side removed so that the middle ear ossicles are visible. This animation shows the ossicular motion for the 34th natural mode of vibration (67.1 kHz), where they move in relative unison. (0.72 MB GIF)

Animated GIF for Figure 27. In this view, the TPC has been turned upside down and the medial side removed so that the middle ear ossicles are visible. This animation shows that the ossicles move in unison for the 40th natural mode of vibration (76.8 kHz), but in a different direction than in previous modes. (0.80 MB GIF)

Animated GIF for Figure 28. In this view, the TPC has been turned upside down and the medial side removed so that the middle ear ossicles are visible for the 49th natural mode of vibration (87.7 kHz). This animation example shows that the ossicles begin to move with slight twisting motions with respect to one another. (0.78 MB GIF)

Animated GIF for Figure 33. In this view, the TPC has been turned upside down and the medial side removed so that the middle ear ossicles are visible for the 102nd natural mode of vibration (143.8 kHz). In this example the malleus twists in an entirely new rotational axis with respect to the incus. (0.79 MB GIF)

Global concern over the possible deleterious effects of noise on marine organisms was catalyzed when toothed whales stranded and died in the presence of high intensity sound. The lack of knowledge about mechanisms of hearing in toothed whales prompted our group to study the anatomy and build a finite element model to simulate sound reception in odo...

Using a food-rewarded, two-choice, instrumental conditioning paradigm we assessed the ability of South African fur seals, Arctocephalus pusillus, to discriminate between members of five chemical classes of aliphatic odorants presumed to differ in their abundance in the marine chemical environment. We found that the fur seals were able to distinguis...

Detailed echolocation behavior studies on free-swimming dolphins require a measurement system that incorporates multiple hydrophones (often >16). However, the high data flow rate of previous systems has limited their usefulness since only minute long recordings have been manageable. To address this problem, this report describes a 47-channel burst-...

We aimed to assess spontaneous food preferences in captive white-handed gibbons and to analyze whether they correlate with nutrient composition. Via a 2-alternative choice test, we repeatedly presented 3 male Hylobates lar with all possible binary combinations of 10 types of food that are part of their diet in captivity and found the following rank...

Much research on dolphin echolocation has focused on animals that have been trained to remain stationary or to carry a device that allows the animals to move but restricts the location of the sonar beam. In such cases, a small number of hydrophones measures sonar characteristics while dolphins solve echolocation tasks. As a result, much is known ab...

Harbour porpoise signals consist of directional, high frequency stereotypic clicks which can be logged using T-PODs. Variation in interclick intervals (ICIs) can be used to distinguish different acoustic behaviours. So far, studies on ICI variation are mostly descriptive and the behavioural context in which certain click train patterns are emitted...

The use of passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is increasingly used as a monitoring tool in e.g environmental impact assessments. However, very few studies have focused on validating PAM data against independent observations which is critical in order to compare data from different studies and areas, and over time. In August 2007 we tested two types...

The present study demonstrates that South African fur seals, Arctocephalus pusillus, can successfully be trained to discriminate between objects on the basis of odor cues. Using a task based on a food-rewarded two-choice discrimination of simultaneously presented odor stimuli the animals acquired the basic operant conditioning paradigm within 480 t...

The present study describes the development and testing of a tool for dolphin research. This tool was able to visualize the dolphin echolocation signals as well as function as an acoustically operated "touch screen." The system consisted of a matrix of hydrophones attached to a semitransparent screen, which was lowered in front of an underwater acr...

While there has been recent concern about the effects of sound on marine mammals, including polar bears, there are no data available measuring the hearing of any bear. The in-air hearing of three polar bears was measured using evoked auditory potentials obtained while tone pips were played to three individually anaesthetized bears at the Kolmården...

The suckling behavior of three bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) mother–calf pairs at the Kolmården Wild Animal Park, Sweden, was followed from birth until the calves were 1 year old, with emphasis on the behavior of the mothers toward other dolphins present in pool. The results show that 80.44% of the sucklings occurred when the dams were no...

Play-fighting is common in many mammals, especially among juveniles/subadults, where it provides a safe opportunity to practice behaviours important to adulthood. To prevent escalation into a potentially dangerous real fight, play fighting is often accompanied by acoustic and/or visual appeasement behaviours. We studied aggressive and play-fight be...

The bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) has a highly variable acoustic repertoire of whistles, clicks, and pulse burst sounds. Whistles are used to express individuality (signature whistle) and emotional state, and to initiate and maintain contact within a group. This study investigated the whistle production pre-and post-partum of three female...

This study presents a first approach to determine a suckling bout criterion interval (BCI) by applying a loge frequency analysis to a dataset of Tursiops truncatus neonate feeding frequencies. The data were gathered by continuous observation on four calves 15–24 hr a day for the first 14 days postpartum. The study was conducted at the dolphinarium...

The site and physiologic mechanism(s) responsible for the generation of odontocete biosonar signals have eluded investigators for decades. To address these issues we subjected postmortem toothed whale heads to interrogation using medical imaging techniques. Most of the 40 specimens (from 19 species) were examined using X-ray computed tomography (CT...

In order to determine in which medium, air or tissue, harbor porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) sounds are produced, the air in the nasal cavities was substituted with heliox (80% helium and 20% oxygen), and the effect on click frequency spectrum was studied. The sound speed is 1.86 times higher in heliox than in air and the resonance frequency of a fixe...

Sound generation in odontocetes takes place in the upper nasal passage, powered by air pressure created within the bony nares (Norris et al., 1971; Diercks et al., 1971; Hollien, 1976; Dormer, 1979; Ridgway et al., 1980; Amundin and Andersen, 1983; Cranford, 1988). Cranford (1988) describes two pairs of fatty bodies, labelled dorsal bursae, situate...

This preliminary report gives the first results from a study using high resolution 3-D computer reconstructions to describe the sound production apparatus of the harbour porpoise, Phocoena phocoena and the jacobita or the Commerson’s dolphin, Cephalorhynchus commersoni. As the majority of investigators seem to agree that the sound source lies in th...

Sound production mechanisms have been studied in two delphinid species - the harbour porpoise, Phocoena phocoena (L.), and the bottlenosed dolphin, Tursiops truncatus (Montagu). It was found that, in both species, the click sound production was coupled to a considerable pressure increase in the bony nares. The maximum pressure recorded in Phocoena...

Analyzing data in object investigation sonar studies on individual dolphins have always been challenging, especially in setups where multiple free-swimming dolphins can echolocate spontaneously and concurrently at the sonar targets. A 47-element array, 0,75 m by 0,75 m, was constructed in order to generate spatially high resolved measurement data u...