Since 2010 photo ID has been collected on the sperm whales at Futurismo. Photo ID is done by taking a picture of the fluke when the sperm whale dives. Preferably the picture was taken right behind the sperm whale, and is when the tail is straight up in the air (see figure 1 below). One of the biologists who was working with us for 9 years up until last summer, Miranda van der Linde, made use of this method and published a paper<\/a> identifying the individual sperm whales. She used not only flukes, but also dorsal fins to identify the sperm whales, and she managed to identify the different social units! You can find brief summary of her paper on our blog<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sperm whales are divers and spend most of their time under water, usually between 70 and 90% of their lives in the Azores (Oliveira et al., 2014). They can dive up to about 2 hours in one go so, sometimes our lookouts have a harder time finding the sperm whales. Since sperm whales make very loud sounds when they dive, in search of squids, it is possible to hear them with the hydrophone a few miles away. This year we quite often used the directional hydrophone to be able to find the sperm whales by listening to them underwater! (see figure 2 and 3 below)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once we found sperm\nwhales, they were usually still in a foraging behaviour. This means that they\nspend about 8-10 minutes at the surface before they go for a foraging dive\nagain, and this is when they start clicking. The clicks are what we are\ninterested in!<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to the way the whale watching is done here in the Azores, the sperm whale is always approached from the back, which makes every recording of the individual easier. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When the sperm whale went for a dive, we used a hydrophone to record the sounds (see cable hanging in the water in figure 4). The hydrophone to collect acoustic data was a little different than the directional hydrophone to search for the sperm whales, as described in the previous section. The difference between the two hydrophones is explained in our previous blog<\/a>. Fadia Al Abbar prepared a proposal to set up a PhD on the acoustic behaviour of sperm whales and was interested in these recordings after the sperm whale dove. With a hydrophone set of Wageningen University, and a recorder, 2 GPS\u2019s and a lens extender donated by the grant of IDEA WILD<\/a>, the team was able to collect the acoustic data, photo ID of the individual being recorded, and the location. We managed to record the foraging clicks, and sometimes we even had some codas! Codas are a sequence of clicks that the sperm whales emit to socialize amongst each other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u2019s an example of our recording of codas:<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Sperm](\"https:\/\/whalewatchingazores.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/sperm-whale-tail-research-futurismo.png\")
Acoustics<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/whalewatchingazores.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/hydrophone-usage-2-futurismo.png\")
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