CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The Mar Chiquita coastal lagoon (Buenos Aires, Argentina) has an important conservation value for its uniqueecosystem. It is classified as a Man and the Biosphere Reserve (MAB, UNESCO, Iribarne 2001) and it is animportant area of tourism and local fishing. From September 1st to December 1st, during the week days, a partialban of fishing activities is imposed in order to protect the reproductive period of silversides Odontesthes spp..However, the black drum, Pogonias cromis, is also an important fish species presents in the lagoon (Cousseauand Perrotta, 2004). During the reproductive period, males produce drumming sounds as advertisement callscharacterized by frequency at approximately 150 Hz (Locascio et al 2011). Boat noise may overlap P. cromissounds causing a potential masking effect (Smott et al. 2018), but it is not known if communication is altered.Aims of our study are to: 1) evaluate the effects of different boat noises on P.cromis acoustic communication 2)analyse the effectiveness of fishing ban activity from an acoustic point of view.Acoustic data were collected during November 2017 by using an autonomous recorder equipped with aBenthowave BII 7016 T6 hydrophone. The sample frequency was 192 kHz at 16 bit, alternating 2 minutes ofrecordings and 8 minutes of pause.All the dataset was visually inspected. P. cromis sounds were identified and counted combining pulse trainanalysis of Avisoft SASlab pro. The number of files where boat noise passages were recorded was counted. Toquantify the potential impact of the boat noise, they were categorized relating to their frequency extension: 1)Class A, when the noise extension was below 700 Hz; 2) Class B, when the noise extension was only over 700Hz; 3) Class C, when the noise extension covered below and over 700 Hz.We recorded boat noise during fish signal emission on 12,8 % of data. We found that the presence of boat noisesignificantly affected the number of fish signals (Welch?s Test p