05 Apr Foraging Behaviour of Humpback Whales: Automatic Detection of Feeding Lunges From Two-dimensional Data

Most rorqual whales forage almost exclusively by performing so-called feeding lunges. It’s difficult to study rorqual foraging behavior through direct observation because most of the lunges are carried out deep in the water column. In this study, they used Wildlife Computer TDR tags in conjunction with HVTags for monitoring animals, as they have a pressure sensor and a sensor to detect whether the tag is in the water or air. In addition, they can be geolocated.

They found that optimization of the 2D detector was done by manually changing the algorithm parameter settings. They used AUC to find the best possible settings and discovered that different individuals required different parameters to trigger an accurate detection.