Ships tune in to underwater sounds, using acoustics technology to protect vulnerable marine giants.
By Brianna Randall, published in Reasons To Be Cheerful
On a gray morning this past March, a half-dozen scientists scanned the sea while bobbing offshore of Chile’s Atacama Desert. When an enormous whale surfaced, their small boat zoomed over to meet it. Marine biologist Susannah Buchan strapped on a waist harness, leaned out over the bow and waited. As the fin whale porpoised again, she placed a forearm-sized neon orange tracker near its dorsal fin. The team would retrieve the tracker the next morning after its suction cups released to download the whale’s movements and listen to its vocalizations.
Fin whales are the world’s second-largest whale species. You might not have heard much about them since “they aren’t the biggest, the jumpiest or the most vocal of whales,” Buchan says. Instead, their claim to fame is more depressing: Fins are the whales most frequently killed by large ships.
Buchan has been tagging fin and blue whales — both of which are listed as endangered species — for the past five years in Chile, in hopes of collecting data that will help ships avoid hitting them. What she’s learning from listening to their underwater sounds might save the lives of some of the largest animals to ever live on our planet.
“The trends are pretty alarming. Vessels are larger, faster, and there are more of them,” says Buchan. “If something isn’t done to protect whales, we expect it will get worse.”
