Because whale calls can be detected and recognized over tens of miles, such devices (which emit no sound) have added to scientific knowledge of the movements and calling behavior of these marine mammals. The findings have been particularly important in parts of the world, such as the seas near Alaska, where standard visual surveys are often hampered by darkness and bad weather.
The article, by Sue E. Moore of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) Alaska Fisheries Science Center and three coauthors, describes the use of two types of recorders, one developed by NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and the other by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The devices are attached to hydrophones that are held at different distances from the ocean floor and are equipped with disk drives able to store tens of gigabytes of data. This allows them to operate for months at a time before they are recovered and the data accessed. Acoustic surveys using the devices have been conducted in the Gulf of Alaska, the southeastern Bering Sea, and the western Beaufort Sea, and have already yielded surprising discoveries about whales. Sperm whales, for example, have been detected in the Gulf of Alaska year-round, although this species has been generally thought to migrate to midlatitudes in winter. And critically endangered North Pacific right whales have been detected acoustically in locations where they were formerly abundant but have not been seen in decades. The results from acoustic whale surveys conducted to date could pave the way for more sophisticated acoustic surveys that would provide data in close to real time.
BioScience publishes commentary and peer-reviewed articles covering a wide range of biological fields, with a focus on "Organisms from molecules to the environment." The journal has been published since 1964. AIBS is an umbrella organization for professional scientific societies and organizations that are involved with biology. It represents some 200 member societies and organizations with a combined membership of about 250,000.
The complete list of research articles in the January 2006 issue of BioScience is as follows:
BioScience