Original provider: Regina A. Guazzo, Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific Dataset credits: Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific Abstract: Minke whale boing calls are commonly detected in Hawaiian waters. When vocalizing, minke whales seem to be in one of two calling behavioral states. Most often minke whales produce boings with inter-call intervals of several minutes, but sometimes minke whales call rapidly with inter-call intervals of less than a minute. Since minke whales are difficult to detect visually, cue rate based density estimation using passive acoustic monitoring has been proposed. However, the variables that influence cue rate or calling rate are poorly understood in most whales including minke whales. We collected passive acoustic recordings from 47 bottom-mounted hydrophones at the Pacific Missile Range Facility’s instrumented range off the coast of Kauaʻi, Hawaiʻi to test the hypothesis that minke whales call more rapidly when closer in proximity to other calling conspecifics. A total of 599 days of data were recorded between August 2012 and July 2017 and were automatically post-processed to detect, classify, and localize calls. Localized calls were automatically tracked and manually validated, resulting in 509 individual tracks composed of 36,033 calls within a 16x39 km study area. Tracked minke whales exhibited a strong bimodal call rate with means of one call every 6.85 min (SD = 2.54 min) and 0.63 min (SD = 0.36 min). We ran hidden Markov models to quantify the relationship between call rate and the distance to the nearest calling conspecific. Overall, the probability of the higher call rate occurring increased as the distance to the nearest conspecific decreased, and the probability of the lower call rate occurring increased as the distance to the nearest conspecific increased. We also examined individual track data and found that minke whales may also exhibit other responses (i.e. increased speed, changes in heading, and cessation of calling) when calling conspecifics are nearby. These findings provide new information about minke whale calling behavior on what are likely their breeding grounds. Supplemental information: The monitoring effort of each of the hydrophones in the array is the same and the hydrophone locations are rounded and approximate.