BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Megafauna
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1641888
Acoustic parameter variation and emission patterns in franciscana dolphin (Pontoporia blainvillei) clicking behavior at high frequency
Provisionally accepted
Lis Bittencourt*
Rafael Carvalho
Karina PereiraElitieri Santos-Neto
Jose Lailson Brito Junior
Tatiana Bisi
Alexandre Azevedo- Rio de Janeiro State University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Franciscana dolphins are small odontocetes that produce narrow-band high-frequency echolocation clicks. Autonomous acoustic monitoring and field survey acoustic sampling were used to record franciscana dolphins in Ilha Grande Bay, Brazil. Clicking sequences were automatically detected and analyzed, and then manually classified into different types; acoustic parameters from individual clicks were extracted. A total of 12505 clicks were detected, 152 clicking sequences were analyzed, of which 43 were click trains and 109 were click packets. Considering all clicks, they occurred from 88.7 kHz to 250 kHz, with a mean peak frequency of 132.4 ± 6.8 kHz. Click trains were longer than click packets, with larger inter-click intervals and mean peak frequencies of 123.6 ± 16.4 kHz and 119.9 ± 15.0 kHz, respectively. Franciscana dolphins emitted different types of clicking sequences. The use of patterned clicks by franciscana dolphins may be an important communication feature at very high frequencies.
Keywords: narrow-band high-frequency, Echolocation clicks, cetacean, Bioacustic, Ilha Grande Bay
Received: 05 Jun 2025; Accepted: 15 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bittencourt, Carvalho, Pereira, Santos-Neto, Brito Junior, Bisi and Azevedo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Lis Bittencourt, lis.bitt@gmail.com
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.