During echolocation, toothed whales produce ultrasonic clicks at extremely rapid rates and listen for the returning echoes. The auditory brainstem response (ABR) duration was evaluated in terms of latency between…
Some odontocetes and bats vary both click intensity and receiver sensitivity during echolocation, depending on target range. It is not known how this so-called automatic gain control is regulated by…
(...) The free-swinging bullae of odontocetes are very massive, their specific weight being twice that of the other skull bones. This feature led Yamada (1953) to his theory that the…
The population structure of harbour porpoises from British and adjacent waters was studied by examining variability in a 200 bp (base pair) section of the control region of mitochondrial DNA…
We captured free-ranging male Yangtze finless porpoises over three seasons and assayed leukocytes and serum biochemistry to investigate physiological responses to the capture and handlings. Serum thyroid hormones (THs) declined…
(...) Direct, undisturbed observations of interactions of mother and offspring in harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) in the wild are extremely rare. Because harbour porpoises are seldom held and hardly breed…
Modern porpoises (Odontoceti: Phocoenidae) are some of the smallest cetaceans and usually feed near the seafloor on small fish and cephalopods [1, 2 and 3]. Within both extinct and extant…
The unique pattern of small tubercles on the leading edge of the dorsal fins of harbor porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) has been widely noted in the literature, though their structure or…
In several publications, it was shown that echolocation sound generation in the nasal (epicranial) complex of toothed whales (Odontoceti) is pneumatically driven. Modern hypotheses consider the larynx and its surrounding…
Toothed whales (Odontoceti, Cetacea) are the only aquatic mammals known to echolocate, and probably all of them are able to produce click sounds and to synthesize their echoes into a…