Bio-logging devices are advancing the understanding of marine animal behavior, but linking sound production and behavior of individual baleen whales is still unreliable. Tag placement potentially within the near field of the sound source creates uncertainty about how tagged animal sounds will register on recorders. This study used data from a tagged singing humpback whale to evaluate this question of how sound levels present on a tag when calls are produced by a tagged animal. Root-mean-square (rms) received levels (RLs) of song units ranged from 112 to 164 dB re 1 μPa rms, with some, but not all, of the lower frequency units registering on the tag's 800 Hz accelerometer sensor. Fifty-nine percent of recorded units measured lower acoustic RLs than previously reported source levels for humpback song, but signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) were 30–45 dB during periods of the dive with low noise. This research highlights that tag RL does not alone predict caller identity, argues for higher SNR thresholds if using SNR to inform decisions about the source of a call, and provides a baseline for future research identifying diagnostic properties of tagged animal calls in cetacean bioacoustic tag datasets.

中文翻译：

---

座头鲸的声音和运动标签上接收到的电平的变化：对呼叫者标识的影响。

生物记录设备正在促进对海洋动物行为的了解，但是将声音的产生与单个鲸鱼的行为联系起来仍然是不可靠的。标签可能会放置在声源的近场内，从而导致不确定带有标签的动物声音在记录器上的记录方式。这项研究使用来自标记的座头鲸的数据来评估这个问题，即当被标记的动物发出呼叫时，标记上的声音水平如何。歌曲单位的均方根（rms）接收电平（RLs）为112至164 dB re  1μ在标签的800 Hz加速度传感器上记录的部分但不是全部低频部分。有59％的记录单位测得的声学RL比以前报道的座头歌的声级低，但是在低噪音的潜水期间，信噪比（SNR）为30-45 dB。这项研究强调，标签RL不能单独预测呼叫者的身份，如果使用SNR来告知有关呼叫来源的决策，则主张使用更高的SNR阈值，并为将来研究识别鲸类生物声标签数据集中被标记动物的诊断特性提供了基线。