Porpoise entanglement recorded in real time, revealing calls and escape attempts

Researchers at the University of St Andrews have gained unprecedented insight into marine mammal behavior when they become tangled in fishing nets. In a paper published Aug. 26 in Royal Society Open Science, researchers from the Sea Mammal Research Unit and Scottish Oceans Institute at St Andrews discovered that their passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) systems, deployed on a gill net, had unintentionally recorded a bycatch event. This is thought to be the first time this kind of recording has taken place in such detail.