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. 2020 Feb 6;10:13. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-55911-3

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Dive profiles of three pairs of beaked whales tagged simultaneously in the same social group: (A) Blainville’s, Canary Islands; (B) Cuvier’s, Ligurian Sea and (C) Cuvier’s, Azores. For each pair, dive profiles are represented by cyan solid and blue dashed lines. Up and down red triangles mark when the first and second whale of the pair starts and finishes vocalising. The remarkable synchronization of dive and vocal activity of the whales while in a group (the Azorean group were observed to split at about 19:00), results in the whales being silent, and therefore largely undetectable by predators that rely on passive acoustics, some 80% of the time. Blue lines at the base of some dives indicate whale separation where this could be calculated from the travel time of the clicks emitted by one whale to the tag carried by its companion. Whales separate horizontally, and in one case vertically, by several hundreds of metres at the base of dives indicating individual foraging despite tight alignment of dive duration, ascent rate and vocal interval. Whale drawings by Brett Jarrett.