Save the Right Whales by Cutting through the Wrong Noise

Fewer than 400 North Atlantic right whales remain in the wild, and not even 100 of them are breeding females. Their biggest survival threats are boat strikes and entanglement in fishing gear. Protecting these whales, such as by diverting boats from dangerous encounters, requires locating them more reliably--and new technology, described in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, could help make that possible. To listen for marine life, researchers often deploy underwater microphones called hydrophones on buoys and robotic gliders. The recorded audio is converted into spectrograms: visual representations of sound used to pinpoint, for instance, specific whale species' calls.