Vessel traffic is prevalent throughout marine environments. However, we often have a limited understanding of vessel impacts on marine wildlife, particularly cetaceans, due to challenges of studying fully-aquatic species. To investigate vessel and acoustic effects on cetacean foraging behavior, we attached suction-cup sound and movement tags to endangered Southern Resident killer whales in their summer habitat while collecting geo-referenced proximate vessel data. We identified prey capture dives using whale kinematic signatures and found that the probability of capturing prey increased as salmon abundance increased, but decreased as vessel speed increased. When vessels emitted navigational sonar, whales made longer dives to capture prey and descended more slowly when they initiated these dives. Finally, whales descended more quickly when noise levels were higher and vessel approaches were closer. These findings advance a growing understanding of vessel and sound impacts on marine wildlife and inform efforts to manage vessel impacts on endangered populations.

船舶交通在整个海洋环境中都很普遍。然而，由于研究全水生物种的挑战，我们通常对船舶对海洋野生动物，尤其是鲸类的影响了解有限。为了研究船只和声学对鲸类觅食行为的影响，我们在夏季栖息地中将吸盘声音和运动标签附加到濒临灭绝的南方居民虎鲸，同时收集地理参考的邻近船只数据。我们使用鲸鱼运动学特征识别猎物捕获潜水，发现捕获猎物的概率随着鲑鱼丰度的增加而增加，但随着船速的增加而降低。当船只发出导航声纳时，鲸鱼会进行更长时间的下潜以捕捉猎物，并在开始这些下潜时下降得更慢。最后，当噪音水平更高且船只靠近时，鲸鱼下降得更快。这些发现促进了人们对船舶和声音对海洋野生动物的影响的日益了解，并为管理船舶对濒危种群的影响的努力提供了信息。