Temporal Variability in Acoustic Behavior of Snapping Shrimp in the East China Sea and Its Correlation With Ocean Environments

Abstract

The snapping shrimp sound is known to be a major biological noise source of ocean soundscapes in coastal shallow waters of low and mid-latitudes where sunlight reaches. Several studies have been conducted to understand the activity of snapping shrimp through comparison with surrounding environmental factors. In this paper, we report the analysis of the sound produced by snapping shrimp inhabiting an area where sunlight rarely reaches. The acoustic measurements were taken in May 2015 using two 16-channel vertical line arrays (VLAs) moored at a depth of about 100 m, located ∼100 km southwest of Jeju Island, South Korea, as part of the Shallow-water Acoustic Variability Experiment (SAVEX-15). During the experiment, the underwater soundscape was dominated by the broadband impulsive snapping shrimp noise, which is notable considering that snapping shrimp are commonly observed at very shallow depths of tens of meters or less where sunlight can easily reach. To extract snapping events in the ambient noise data, an envelope correlation combined with an amplitude threshold detection algorithm were applied, and then the sea surface-bounced path was filtered out using a kurtosis value of the waveform to avoid double-counting in snap rate estimates. The analysis of the ambient noise data received for 5 consecutive days indicated that the snap rate fluctuated with a strong one-quarter-diurnal variation between 200 and 1,200 snaps per minute, which is distinguished from the periodicity of the snap rate reported in the euphotic zone. The temporal variation in the snap rate is compared with several environmental factors such as water temperature, tidal level, and current speed. It is found that the snap rate has a significant correlation with the current speed, suggesting that snapping shrimp living in the area with little sunlight might change their snapping behavior in response to changes in current speed.