Towards a bottlenose dolphin whistle ethogram from the Shannon Estuary, Ireland

An ethogram of whistle types from the Shannon Estuary is presented. A total of 1715 whistles recorded over a three-year period between 2003 and 2005 were analysed. They were categorized into six fundamental shapes and 25 sub-categories. The most common whistle type encountered in the analysis was a simple rising tone. Whistles ranged in duration from 0.061 to 1.61 seconds. Whistle contour mean frequencies ranged between 13.21kHz and 7.71kHz, but there was a great deal of variability in all characteristics of the whistles within each category.