Antarctica’s extreme environment represents one of the unique habitats where melanised, slow-growing, rock-inhabiting fungi (RIF) thrive. This study characterised 15 fungal strains of the genus Vermiconidia isolated from rocks on James Ross and Tail Islands in Antarctica through morphological, physiological, and multilocus phylogenetic analyses. Most strains were phenotypically similar and difficult to distinguish. However, a...

Acoustic monitoring is an essential tool for investigating animal communication and behavior when visual contact is limited, but the scalability of bioacoustic projects is often limited by time‐intensive manual auditing of focal signals. To address this bottleneck, we introduce orcAI—a novel deep learning framework for the automated detection and classification of a broad acoustic repertoire of killer whales ( Orcinus orca ),...

The distribution and occurrence of killer whales around Iceland are primarily studied in coastal herring grounds, with limited knowledge beyond these areas. This study employed opportunistic passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) data from four regions across Icelandic inshore and offshore waters to investigate killer whale distribution between 2018 and 2023. An automatic detector‐and‐classifier algorithm identified killer whale bu...

Killer whales ( Orcinus orca ) have group‐specific call repertoires that can be used to track groups and populations using passive acoustic monitoring. To provide a detailed description of the Icelandic killer whale repertoire and its variation, we analyzed acoustic data collected in five locations between 1985 and 2016. Calls were classified manually, and CART and random forest analyses were employed to validate the manual cl...

Long-finned pilot whales and killer whales are widely distributed across the North Atlantic, but few studies have reported their occurrence in Icelandic coastal waters. Here, we use sightings data from research platforms and whale watching tours in six regions of Iceland from 2007 to 2020 to show that the occurrence of long-finned pilot and killer whales varied with region and season. Killer whales were regularly encountered i...

Killer whale call repertoires can provide information on social connections among groups and populations. Killer whales in Iceland and Norway exhibit similar ecology and behavior, are genetically related, and are presumed to have been in contact before the collapse of the Atlanto‐Scandian herring stock in the 1960s. However, photo‐identification suggests no recent movements between Iceland and Norway but regular movement betwe...