822 I. C. Avila et al.
(Idárraga-García & León, 2019). This could explain the high probability of occurrence of sperm whales in this area, as in the Azores where seamount complexes are prefered habitat for the sperm whale (Tobeña et al., 2016). Sperm whales are deep divers and their main diet is cephalopods, usual- ly subtropical and muscular cephalopod species of the Onychoteuthidae and Histioteuthidae families (Evans & Hindell, 2004), which range throughout the water column to at least 3,000m depth. In the Colombian Caribbean, 48 cephalopod species have been documented, including two species of Onychoteuthidae (Guerrero-Kommritz, 2021). Our findings indicate that the Caribbean waters of
Colombia may be an important tropical feeding and breed- ing habitat for sperm whales. In the Caribbean Region there are increasing pressures on marine mammals from coastal development, fishing, boat traffic, river sediment loading, alien species and climate change (Miloslavich et al., 2010; SPAW-RAC, 2020; Avila & Giraldo, 2022). Sperm whales in the region are affected by incidental catch in fishing nets and collision with boats (SPAW-RAC, 2020). In the Colombian Caribbean Sea commercial fisheries are concen- trated in the south and north-east (Kroodsma et al., 2018), areas where there is a high probability of sperm whale presence. The Colombian Caribbean region is also an in- ternational and national tourist destination (during 2000– 2019 an average of 145 tourist cruise ships .150m long ar- rived annually in San Andrés, Cartagena and Santa Marta; CITUR, 2021). The transit of such large ships puts whales at risk of collisions (Laist et al., 2001). In 2009 the tourist cruise ship Summer Flower (169m long) on the route from Santa Marta (Colombia) to Antwerp (Belgium) collided with a fin whale Balaenoptera physalus, and arrived in Belgium with the dead whale on its bow (Haelters et al., 2018). Our analyses suggest that theVulnerable sperm whalemay
be both feeding and breeding in the Colombian Caribbean Sea, and provides information that will be useful formanage- ment of this cetacean species. Efforts for the conservation and sustainable use of the distribution area of this species, identi- fied here, need to be implemented in this region.
Acknowledgements We thank Anadarko Colombia Company (since 2019, Occidental Petroleum Corporation), Repsol Exploración Colombia and Shell for allowing the use of data. OSC Limited, EPI Group, CGG & Vision Project Services provided the services of ma- rine fauna observers and passive acoustic monitoring operators and we acknowledge all observers and operators who supported data col- lection (Salomé Dussán, Juan Manuel Salazar, Alexandra Gärtner, Chad Leedy, Israel Ribeiro, James Doom, Marilia Olio, Leif Halvors and Nicholas Engelmann). We thank fishers from San Andrés and Luis F. Batista from Urabá Gulf for providing information on whales, Javier Alarcón for provision of a photograph, Hal Whitehead for pro- viding access to his data, Ana Marroquim, Paula Gómez, Andrés Palacios and Octavio Ortega for comments on the text, Greg Jenssen for editing help, and two anonymous reviewers and the Editor for their critiques. ICA and DCB-B were supported in 2020–2021 by the Universidad del Valle and Centro de Investigaciones Oceanográficas
e Hidrográficas del Caribe, respectively, and the Colombian Sciences Ministry (Call no. 848 of 2019).
Author contributions Study design: ICA; data collection: ICA, NF-C, LC-M; data analysis: ICA, NF-C, KBdA; writing: ICA, NF-C; revision, editing: all authors.
Conflicts of interest None.
Ethical standards This research abided by the Oryx guidelines on ethical standards.
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Oryx, 2022, 56(6), 814–824 © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605321001113
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