'Listening' to save the North Atlantic right whale (earthsky.org)
Posted by
Kelly Kizer Whitt
June 4, 2021
There’ve been stories in recent years about whales’ sensitive hearing being harmed by human sounds in the ocean. Now comes a story about using the whales’ own sounds to protect them. The North Atlantic right whale is one of the most endangered whale species on Earth. Entanglement in fishing gear and vessel strikes are their leading causes of death. Scientists from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, have developed a technology that lets machines distinguish between the sounds right whales make and the sounds of other sea-going activities such as shipping, fishing and drilling. The development, announced June 3, 2021, will let the whales be detected before they get too close to, for example, large ships.
The scientists said they hope their work can protect whales, as well as prevent costly shutdowns of offshore operations.
The study was published June 3 in the peer-reviewed journal The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
The scientists said their new techniques can remove unwanted noises of human activity from undersea recordings. That should result in more reliable detections of right whales. Currently, people have to detect whales visually. That’s not possible at night or in poor seeing conditions. Ben Milner of the University of East Anglia is lead researcher of the study. He said the new technology provides hope that right whales will now survive some situations that once would have been fatal. He explained:
The aim of this work is to develop robust methods of detecting marine mammals from passive acoustic monitoring devices in challenging environments. Having the ability to deploy an automated system – whether it be on buoys, Autonomous Surface Vehicles, or gliders – that can achieve high levels of detection in real-time, is vital to the long-term future of right whales.
Being able to reliably detect marine mammals is important for population monitoring and for mitigation, as many species are endangered and protected by environmental laws.
more: https://earthsky.org/earth/endangered-north-atlantic-right-whale-sound/?utm_source=EarthSky+News
