WASHINGTON — Southern resident orcas have struggled to survive off Washington’s coast, and yet, researchers are still facing gaps when it comes to understanding and protecting them.
A new University of Washington study hopes to change that.
The project aims to track the sounds of marine mammals, such as the southern resident orcas, with underwater fiber optic cables.
It’s the same kind of cable that many use to connect to the internet.
It’s an effort to better understand and track these endangered mammals, and quantify the impact that human activity is having on them.
“This technology has been around for a couple of years, but it has been used for detecting low frequency signals, like earthquake signals,” said Dr. Shima Abadi, the lead researcher from UW Bothell School of STEM and UW School of Oceanography. “We are trying to push the limit to see if we can use this technology for detecting higher frequency ranges.”
That would allow researchers to detect the sounds of orcas and other mammals with high-frequency vocalizations, like humpback whales.
Right now, tracking vocalizations of these mammals requires the use hydrophones, which can only detect sounds at a singular point.
If this project works, researchers could expand the work into the existing network of thousands of kilometers of underwater cabling that’s currently deployed worldwide.
The southern resident orca population has declined significantly in the 1960s and 1970s, and they are now considered endangered.
The Center for Whale Research, which tracks the southern resident orca population each year, has not observed a significant rebound in today’s numbers.
“Because orcas spend nearly all their time under the water surface, it is challenging for researchers to get a full picture of their movements through only visual observation,” the university wrote in a press release about the research.
One of the major concerns researchers have is how ship noise and other manmade noise affect the orcas.
Orcas rely on sound for basic activities, including hunting and vessel noise has been shown to limit their ability to locate prey.
“We’re really hopeful that this will be one tool in the broader toolset that scientists, practitioners and decision makers can use to better understand the environment,” said Yuta Masuda, Director of Science at Allen Family Philanthropies, which is helping fund the project with a $1.5 million grant. “Better understand our impacts.”
Researchers will track data over the next two years and work with local nonprofits, including Beam Reach, to locate and understand orca movements.
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