Regular Wired Science readers know that I have a thing for underwater microphones. Streaming the depths of the ocean to your laptop is just plain awesome. But now scientists are using them to do some good. Researchers at the Cornell Bioacoustics Research Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute have teamed up to use hydrophones to protect endangered whales off the coast of Massachusetts.
Using ten microphones attached by a stretchy data cable to buoys at the surface and special software that picks out the acoustic signature of right whales, the scientists are able to detect the slow-moving marine mammals. When a hydrophone hears a whale, it makes a cell or satellite call to researchers who contact ship captains to tell them to watch out. The map to the right is a near real-time detection map provided to you, at listenforwhales.org.
It’s important work as less than 400 right whales survive and run-ins with ships are a leading cause of their death.
The project’s website features a ton of interesting information, including whale sounds with their spectrographic signatures alongside, so you can see the frequency diagram of what you’re hearing.
They also provide an interesting lesson on the development of underwater listening technology, including a page on pop-ups (seen left), which function as ocean acoustic archives. Researchers drop one into the waters they’re interested in and go back home. The device records several months worth of oceanic chatter to its hard drive. Then the researchers come back and beam a particular sound into the water that, when picked up by the pop-up’s hydrophone, causes the device to detach from its anchor and float to the surface.
I’m a little late with this, but the AP’s Jay Lindsay got out onto the water with the researchers and filed a great story from Cape Cod.
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