Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) belong baleen whales. They migrate between high-latitude summer feeding regions and low-latitude wintering regions where calving and make place.There were 1~60 humpback whales whaled every year during 1920~1967 in southern Taiwan. However, only a few sights were recorded in the past twenty years.
A male humpback whale was sighted on the east coast of Taiwan in March, 2000. His songs recorded during between three-day tailing were analysed. There were five themes and nine units in the songs, a complete song duration lasted about 14.2 minutes. The maximal sound pressure level was 189.6 dB (n=32, SEM =2.81). The acoustic characters (i.e., signal duration, time between two signals, theme duration, fundamental frequency) of the songs were not significant different. A visual comparison of the spectrograms of the sound units from this particalar whale with those northwest Pacific Ocean showed similarity. This individual was a member of the population in the northwest Pacific Ocean. This conclusion was also supported by the result of Photo-ID of its fluke.
Ceatceans live in the water and develop the special model to produce sounds. There are two kinds of communicative signals: pulses and whistles. These two signals were characters of phylogenetic relationship and the outgroup was red deer. There were two monophyletic groups. Evolution of communicative signals in cetaceans was whistle existent and added the pulses signals. Last, the whistles lost and only with pulses.
The fumctions of pulse signals in communication was unknown in delphinidae. Sperm whales, pygmy sperm whales, dwarf sperm whales, Baird¡¦s beaked whales and Hector¡¦s dolphins were only use pulse signals. The reason of this change was unclear.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0909102-114142 |
| Date | 09 September 2002 |
| Creators | Yu, Hsin-Yi |
| Contributors | Ruey-Chung Wei, Hin-Kiu Mok, Bao-Sen Shieh |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | Cholon |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0909102-114142 |
| Rights | unrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive |
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