Acoustic methods may improve the ability to identify cetacean species during shipboard
surveys. Whistles were recorded from nine odontocete species in the eastern tropical Pacific
to determine how reliably these vocalizations can be classified to species based on simple
spectrographic measurements. Twelve variables were measured from each whistle (n=
908). Parametric multivariate discriminant function analysis (DFA) correctly classified 41.1%
of whistles to species. Non‐parametric classification and regression tree (CART) analysis …

Acoustic techniques have the potential to increase the reliability of cetacean species
identification during shipboard surveys. The whistles of nine odontocete species were
compared using data collected from a towed array and sonobuoys deployed during dolphin
abundance surveys in the eastern tropical Pacific. Twelve variables were measured
manually from spectrographic displays of each whistle (n= 912). Multivariate discriminant
function analysis (DFA) resulted in 49.9% of whistles being classified to the correct species …