Hey Google - Find this New Whale Sound

Scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have been placing recording devices in the deep Pacific Ocean since 2005. They have collected an enormous amount of data, more than 500 TB or almost 200 000 hours of recordings.

An almost unmanageable amount. It would have taken the researchers almost 23 years to listen through it all, and they still wouldn’t have been able to identify what was actually heard on the recordings. This is where AI entered the scene.

Using Google AI’s machine learning, the researchers have now been able to sort through the thousands of hours of acoustic recordings of all sorts of sounds mixed together. They were now able to identify when, where and what sound they were hearing, and in this way they were able to distinguish the mechanical-sounding whale song that the researchers call Biotwang (here you can listen to different whale songs, including the Biotwang of the Bryde’s whale)

In 2018, NOAA scientists conducted a visual and acoustic survey of marine mammals in the Mariana Archipelago and discovered 10 different groups of Bryde’s whales. In nine of the 10 different groups, they were able to identify the Biotwang sound. 

We now know who is making the noise, and the new data has allowed us to see how many whales have travelled in the area and at what times. That’s the news. But we still don’t know why they are there or what the sounds mean.

– We are still at the stage where we hear their sounds and assume they are passing by to find food, say the researchers.

The results of the research were recently published in Frontiers in Marine Science.

The next step will be to learn more specifically about the movement patterns of Bryde’s whales. Seeing where they are, when they are, and understanding why they are there, to better protect the species.