As science advances, many more technological devices are being developed to pinpoint whale calls. Only 400 North Atlantic right whales remain in the wild and less than 100 of them are breeding females. Their biggest survival threats are boat strikes and entanglement in fishing gear, and hence it is extremely important to utilize technology to locate the whale habitats more reliably. To listen for marine life, researchers often use underwater microphones called hydrophones on buoys and robotic gliders. Then the recorded audio is converted into spectrograms which are visual representations of sound used to pinpoint specific whale species’ calls. However, background sounds hinder the reliability of this technology. Now, researchers have trained two deep learning models to cut through the noise. In order to train the machine, the researchers started by giving the models thousands of clean spectrograms with only North Atlantic right whale calls. Then they slowly added in many spectrograms contaminated with background sounds such as boat engines. The algorithms in these advanced technologies can turn noisy spectrograms into clean ones, helping spot whales before they reach dangerous areas.
Shyam Madhusudhana, a Cornell university data engineer, who was not involved in the study, said he would want to see if such models could be used to locate other marine mammals too. Usually, humpback whales and dolphins have much more complex speech pathways than the right whale. Some scientists also want to take this technology above water as well. For example, University of East Anglia machine learning researcher Ben Milner, one of the study’s authors, wants to take this technology above water to identify animals near the site of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe. Despite the incredible accuracy that this technology is believed to bring, it should not be the only approach to prevent ship strikes or entanglement. This is because North Atlantic right whales can be silent for hours at a time. These complexities are motivating scientists to come up with more advanced technologies and continuous efforts are being made to conserve the remaining whales in the world.
Work Cited:
Scientific American October 2021 Magazine