Category Archives: Acoustics
FREE RINGTONE: A HUMPBACK WHALE SINGING IN DOUGLAS CHANNEL, BC
One of the things that makes humpback whales so interesting to study is their iconic song. Many of us first heard these haunting sounds when Dr Roger Payne published them in a vinyl, floppy 45rpm soundsheet in an old issue of National Geographic. Generally, humpbacks sing on their breeding grounds (in Hawaii and Mexico), and [...]
Five Ways to Show Your Love for the Ocean.
Whale you be my Valentine? I dolphinately will! Illustration by Leafeon via Quid Pro Quo on Tumblr Love prompts us to do brave, romantic and sometimes foolish things. To paraphrase Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, today we’re asking ourselves: How do I love thee, Ocean? Let me count the ways. We came up with 5. On Valentine’s Day this [...]
“KEEPING QUIET”
We are field biologists. We get excited about field work, not meetings. But we can’t tell you how excited we are to attend next week’s planning session for an International Quiet Ocean Experiment. {The fact that it’s in Paris, home of the best bakery in the world, may have something to do with it.} The [...]
The Little Boat That Could…
It’s amazing what you can accomplish from a little boat! Here’s a photo of Rob preparing a pop-up hydrophone (a microphone that listens underwater) for deployment. Our colleagues at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology invented these amazing hydrophones that sit on the sea-bed and record all the sounds in the ocean including whales, dolphins [...]
I LOVE DOLPHINS IN THE SPRINGTIME
It’s that time of year again. Pacific white-sided are making appearances in the waters throughout the Pacific Northwest. Last month, Knight Inlet, BC was bursting with Pacific white-sided dolphins and we were there to collect ID photographs, acoustic recordings (Click here to listen) and prey samples. Soon after our Knight Inlet trip ended, our colleague, [...]
REMEMBER, THE CAMERA ADDS 10 TONNES…
At New Year’s, we all make resolutions about diet. But we’ve got nothing on Pacific humpback whales, which are currently on their mating and calving grounds in Hawaii and Mexico. During this time, they go weeks or months without eating at all. BC waters provide important habitat for these highly migratory animals. When they’re here [...]
The Big Idea: Noisy Ocean
Brandon Southall and Chris Clark were just profiled in National Geographic for their work on whale communication and shipping noise. Click on the drawing to check out the full story in National Geographic. (Personally, we’re excited to see the growing profile of this issue, and consider ourselves lucky to be working with Chris and his [...]
Ships are loud
Check out what a humpback whale hears as a ship steams around Vancouver Island: In partnership with acousticians and engineers at Cornell University’s Bioacoustics Research Program, we’ve deployed a number of hydrophones to measure underwater shipping noise in BC. Cornell’s Dimitri Ponirakis produced this amazing animation based on our data to illustrate what a humpback [...]
Dolphin Twitter
We don’t know what they’re saying, yet, but it must be important. Click here to hear clicks, calls and dolphin chatter!
Shipping noise and project CONCEAL (Chronic Ocean Noise: Cetacean Ecology and Acoustic habitat Loss)
Sound is as important to whales as vision is to us. Sound travels farther in the ocean than light does — so whales grunt, call or sing, or listen intently, and their lives depend on sending and receiving these acoustic cues reliably. They’re quite good at it. Whales and their prey have evolved these acoustic [...]
photo by J. Towers
