Summary
During the past years, François Sarano and his team have been periodically returning to Mauritius island in order to record local sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus, Pm). Some recordings have also been made by Axel Preud'homme from Marine Megafauna Conservation Organisation and by René Heuzey from Label Bleu Production. Each year the recording protocol has been evolving to improve the data collection. Since 2017, on the initiative of H. Glotin, V. and F. Sarano have been using a GoPro Hero 4 mounted on a stereophonic acoustic antenna of our design, based on our JASON SMIoT Toulon ultra high velocity DAQ designed for these extreme recordings. Our protocol has evolved each year, with the access to additional high quality hydrophones: 2 hydrophones in 2017, 3 in 2018, and 4 in 2019. The hydrophones are from Cetacean Research. The DAQ is the Qualilife sound card, which was used in this study at 16 bits@300 kHz. It is able to record at a sampling rate up to 2 MHz per channel, up to 5 channels.
Data description
The names of the files consist of multiple fields separated by dashes. The fields order is "animal's name", "age", "date of the recording", "Is alone", "recorder's serial number", and "recorder's model". Missing values are replaced by NaN. For example: DAREN-1an-20190329-NaN-R108C017_190329MTS02-SONY_F55.MXF
You can also download the metadata file containing the name of each individual and their date of birth when available, or the annotations file in HDF or in CSV format. The spectrograms of the annotations is also available. The title format of the spectrograms is "click number - timestamp in seconds - file number". The table with the correspondance between file number and filename is present after each individual. The wav files for the annotated clicks are available here. Channels correspond to the click number. Note that the program you used to read the wav file might introduce an off-by-one error (channel 1 is click 0, channel 2 is click 1, ...). Other useful resources can be found on the other resources page.
Acknowledgement
Permission to conduct the Maubydick project, including the taking of sloughed skin fragments, was granted by the Department for Continental Shelf, Maritime Zones Administration and Exploration of the Mauritius Prime Minister Office, on the 21 February 2017.
Fieldwork, video recording and data analysis were granted by the NGOs Longitude 181 (Valence, France) and ‘Un Océan de Vie’ (Marseille, France), by the Label Bleu Production (Marseille, France), by the Foundation Foundation Nature et Découvertes and by Teria (Vitry sur Seine, France).
Mauritian public authorities greatly helped the Maubydick project, in particular the Mauritian Prime Minister Office, the Marine Continental Shelf Exploration and Administration (MCSEA; Dr Réza Badal and his team), the Albion Fisheries Research Center (AFRC; Chief Scientific officer Mr Satish Kadhun), the Mauritius Film Development Corporation (MFDC; Mr Sachin Jootun and Miss Eliana Timol) and the Tourism Authority (TA; Miss royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rsos R. Soc. Open Sci. 8: 201794 11 Khoudijah Boodoo, Director). We thank Navin Boodhonee and the Blue Water Diving Center (Trou aux Biches, Mauritius) for their valuable participation in the fieldwork. We also thank Carole Decker (Brest, France) for her help with the laboratory experiments.
