Markov modeling for a satellite tag data record of whale diving behavior

TL;DR

This paper develops a hierarchical Bayesian hidden Markov model to analyze satellite telemetry data of whale diving behavior, revealing behavioral changes in response to sonar exposure, including shortened intervals between dives and avoidance of deep dives.

Contribution

It introduces a novel HMM approach with movement types and covariates for analyzing discretized dive data, improving behavioral response detection in marine mammals.

Findings

Whales shorten intervals between deep dives after sonar exposure.

Whales tend to avoid deep dives following sound exposure.

Model effectively captures baseline and altered diving behaviors.

Abstract

Cuvier's beaked whales (Ziphius cavirostris) are the deepest diving marine mammal, consistently diving to depths exceeding 1,000m for durations longer than an hour, making them difficult animals to study. They are important to study because they are sensitive to disturbances from naval sonar. Satellite-linked telemetry devices provide up to 14-day long records of dive behavior. However, the time series of depths is discretized to coarse bins due to bandwidth limitations. We analyze telemetry data from beaked whales that were exposed to moderate levels of sonar within controlled exposure experiments (CEEs) to study behavioral responses to sound exposure. We model the data as a hidden Markov model (HMM) over the time series of discrete depth bins, introducing partially observed movement types and recent diving activity covariates to model marginal non-stationarity. Movement types provide more flexible modeling for CEEs than partially observed dive stages, which are more commonly used in dive behavior HMMs. We estimate the proposed model within a hierarchical Bayesian framework, using HMM methods to compute marginalized likelihoods and posterior predictive distributions. We assess behavioral response by comparing observed post-exposure behavior to usual unexposed behavior via the posterior predictive distribution. The model quantifies patterns in baseline diving behavior and finds evidence that beaked whales deviate in response to sound. We find evidence that (i) beaked whales initially shorten the time they spend between deep dives, which may have physiological effects and (ii) subsequently avoid deep dives, which can result in lost foraging opportunities.