It was definitely a good week. This morning I got word from the editorial staff at the IWC office that our manuscript about odontocetes in American Samoa is accepted for publication in the Journal of Cetacean Research and Management. This is great news as it will provide a good baseline for future studies as well as a tool for NMFS to move forward with listing "stocks" of cetaceans in the waters of American Samoa. Currently there are no stocks recognized for this region. It will start with spinner dolphins, as the genetics are clear enough from this paper. Next up might be Rough-toothed dolphins - Steno bredanensis.
Also, we got some great news from the folks at the Hawaii Undersea Research Lab (yes the acronym is HURL). Using their submersible, they were able to release our HARP trapped on the summit of Cross Seamount (see below). Apparently the instrument was sitting upright on a patch of sand and simple needed a nudge to get it moving to the surface! We now have 12 months of data from Cross, which is an interesting place when it comes to beaked whales. More on that later.
Finally, I've been able to get XBAT working on my MacPro. I'd been struggling to get it working right, but after installing the latest Libsndfile libraries (made even easier by FINK) it is working like a charm. I'm currently running an odontocete whistle detector on some HARP data from Ladd Seamount in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Below is a spectrogram that shows some detections of simple downsweeps (most likely pilot whales).
