DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.13308835
title: Males miss and females forgo: auditory masking from vessel noise impairs foraging efficiency and success in killer whales - CALIBRATED MOVEMENT DATA AND VARIABLES SUPPORTING ANALYSES

description: Description of the data and file structureThis record contains data from animal-borne biologging instruments (Dtags) temporarily affixed to fish-eating killer whales, supporting the analyses presented in the following article:

 Tennessen. J.B., Holt, M.M., Wright, B.M., Hanson, M.B., Emmons, C.K., Giles, D.A., Hogan, J.T., Thornton, S.J., Deecke, V.B. 2024. Males miss and females forgo: auditory masking from vessel noise impairs foraging efficiency and success in killer whales. Global Change Biology. In press.

The data include the following: (1) calibrated movement data from analyzed Dtag deployments, and (2) a spreadsheet containing the variables included in the fully-saturated and final models listed in Table 2 in the article cited above. All methodological details necessary to contextualize analysis procedures are provided in the methods section of the article. The following data files are available under separate DOIs: 10.5281/zenodo.13333019 - all 2009 & 2010 audio data; 10.5281/zenodo.13328931 - all 2011 & 2014 audio data.

These data are provided by NOAA Fisheries' Northwest Fisheries Science Center, and Fisheries and Oceans Canada, to support reproducibility of all statistical analyses presented in the article. Please cite your usage of our data. For inquiries about data use, or for general questions, please contact Dr. Jennifer B. Tennessen, at jtenness@uw.edu.

 

Description of the movement data filesThe movement files have been calibrated from the raw data and are ready to use. The files contain the .mat extension, and need to be opened using Matlab and the tagtools tool kit available at https://github.com/animaltags . Tutorials for working with the toolkit are available at animaltags.org .  These files contain several vector and matrix variables. We define those used in our analyses below. For questions about how to work with these files, please contact Dr. Jennifer B. Tennessen, at jtenness@uw.edu.

Aw: calibrated triaxial accelerometer data (converted from tag frame to whale frame)

fs: sample rate (50 Hz)

head: animal's circular heading (rotation about the dorsal-ventral axis, in radians)

Mw: calibrated triaxial magnetometer data (converted from tag frame to whale frame)

p: depth (in meters)

pitch: animal's pitch (rotation about the left-right axis, in radians)

roll: animal's roll (rotation about the anterior-posterior axis, in radians)

tempr: temperature recorded on tag (in Celsius)

TT: time cues for the start and end of every analyzed dive within a deployment. This matrix contains 6 columns:-col 1: start cue (in sec)-col 2: end cue (in sec)-col 3: maximum depth of dive (m)-col 4: time cue at max depth (in sec)-col 5: mean depth (m)-col 6: mean compression

 

Description of the analyzed variablesThe data are provided column-wise in a spreadsheet, whereby each column contains one of several variables used to build the corresponding models listed in Table 2 in the above article. Model details are provided in the above article, including the statistical packages needed to run the models. 

The following is a list of variable names (column headers) and their corresponding definitions:bzsounds: binary presence (1)/absence (0) of buzz bouts within a dive. Buzzing is defined as the occurrence of echolocation clicks with an inter-click interval < 11 mscode: categorical identifier of the numerical week of year in which the tag was deployed (e.g., week 33 of 2009 is different than week 33 of 2011)deployment: the event whereby a tag was affixed to an individual killer whale and data were collected via tag sensors; each deployment was assigned a unique deployment ID, consisting of the first letter of the Genus and species names (“oo” for Orcinus orca), followed by two digits corresponding to the year (“09” = 2009), followed by the Julian day of the year (e.g. “234”), followed by a letter indicating the deployment order of the day. NRKW deployments were assigned a through l, and SRKW deployments were assigned m through z (e.g. “a” = first deployment of the day for NRKW, “m” = first deployment of the day for SRKW)durwho: duration of a whole dive, in seconds. Dives were defined as all departures from the surface, to at least 1 m or deeper, followed by a return to within 0.5 m of the surfacedivenum: chronological identifier for dive position within a deployment (e.g., for the 10th dive within a deployment, divenum = 10)kindet: binary presence (1)/absence (0) of a prey capture event within a dive. Prey capture was informed by the occurrence of stereotyped movement signatures in sensor data indicative of prey capture, following an established method validated with visual and acoustic confirmation of predation events. Prey capture is defined as the occurrence of three movement variables indicative of prey capture (peak jerk, roll and heading variance) each exceeding pre-determined thresholds (see Tennessen et al. 2019b in above article for details)maxdep: maximum depth of a dive, in metersNLmax: the maximum noise level received during a dive, measured as the root-mean-square sound pressure level (dB re 1 mPa) within one second bins over the 15-45 kHz frequency bandpopulation: population to which the tagged whale belongs (NRKW = Northern Resident killer whale; SRKW = Southern Resident killer whale)sex: sex of tagged whale (F = female, M = male, NA = unknown)sc: binary presence (1)/absence (0) of slow-click sounds within a dive. Slow-clicking is defined as the occurrence of echolocation clicks with an inter-click interval >100 mstagID: identifier for the individual tag used for each deploymentyear: year of deployment