Cetacean Communication

I was just interviewed by Seattle's KING 5 TV about my advice on how boaters should behave when out on the marine waters this Labor Day weekend. Not sure when the piece will air, but could be multiple times tonight.
📷 by Joy Reidenberg at Five Finger Lighthouse

On my way home from a very productive half month at the Five Finger Lighthouse as part of Fred Sharpe's Humpback Whale Missed Signals Project team. Field season is only half over, so follow Cetacean Institute to learn more about it and how you can donate to the project to help with its success!

Thank you, Landau, for the use of your cargo van so I could transport nearly a half ton of food and scientific instrumentation to Alaska Marine Lines to ship to Petersburg, Alaska for the Humpback Whale Missed Signals research project I'm assisting with starting next week. The instrumentation, food, and SETI affiliate expenses are funded by a "Stride" seed grant from the SETI Institute. However, expenses and even nominal compensation for key technical personnel, including myself, are not covered by the grant. Without us to assemble, test, and operate the instrumentation, the equipment will be of no use. That's why the Cetacean Institute is actively raising funds to reimburse many of us for the costs of getting to Petersburg and hopefully also some compensation for the weeks to months of time we're devoting to this project. I encourage everyone who would like to contribute to this project to visit the donation page for the project here:

https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/project-001-humpback-whale-aerial-signals-project

In the coming weeks, I'll be live-streaming from Five Finger Lighthouse on the this and the Cetacean Institute account, so you can follow our progress. Follow both accounts on Instagram, if you don't already, because they are now active and will feature more live-streams.

The NYT has an excellent audio-visual description of airgun noise and its masking effects on the highly endangered Rice's whales in the Gulf of Mexico.

Dive Into a Very Noisy Sea With Some Very Rare Whales (Gift Article) Fewer than 100 Rice’s whales remain on Earth. Researchers say sonic blasts from oil exploration are a top threat to the species. See and hear why.

NOAA Fisheries West Coast new tech memo on underwater sounds is now available. Titled "Underwater acoustic monitoring desktop study : A collaborative initiative between Port of Seattle (PoS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)", you can read the memo here:

NOAA Institutional Repository The NOAA IR serves as an archival repository of NOAA-published products including scientific findings, journal articles, guidelines, recommendations, or other information authored or co-authored by NOAA or funded partners. As a repository, the NOAA IR retains documents in their original published fo...

In early February, I started a new nonprofit organization called the .institute whose mission is to foster and fund novel, speculative research on cetaceans in their natural habitats by researchers who don't otherwise have institutional support. The first project were funding in Dr. Fred Sharpe's Humpback Whale Aerial Signals Project. You can donate to the Cetacean Institute (2nd image) or to the project (5th image) by using the QR codes in the post carousel.
Links are:
Cetacean Institute
https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/donate-to-the-cetacean-institute

Humpback Whale Aerial Signals Project
https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/project-001-humpback-whale-aerial-signals-project

Part one of an interview with Dr. Fred Sharpe that includes some technical ramblings from me. See below to listen.

Over the decades, I've taught many training courses on hydrophone operation and underwater sound analysis. These classes were always focused on Cetacean Research Technology hydrophones that I had designed, manufactured, and sold. Now that I no longer build hydrophones, I haven't taught any classes and I miss that! I would love to teach more classes on underwater recording and/or sound analysis, and rather than deciding exactly what the courses would entail by myself, I'd like to hear from you what you'd like to learn. Please let me know in the comments.
Also, any class I teach will be in person. We learn so much better that way, and I've run online training sessions since long before it became the post-pandemic standard and I'm no longer interested in doing that.

Throwback to 13 years ago when I designed and built this directional stereo hydrophone with the help of .
Nine year old shown for scale 🙂 and he also filmed the assembly and operating video I narrated for the customer.

The oldest recording of a humpback whale from 1949. There's a link in the beginning of the article to the recording.

WHOI Discovers the Oldest Known Whale Recordings, Dating to 1949 | Newswise WHOI researchers and archivists have identified what may be the earliest preserved recording of a whale: the song of a humpback, captured on March 7, 1949, near Bermuda.