whale anti-collision

September 12, 2008 9:43 AM

A new whale anti-collision system"A remarkable feature of Andre's system is its ability to single out and track an individual whale among all its “family” members in the same area – a breakthrough made with the help of a West African musician. In attempting to unravel the chaotic rhythms of the sperm whale clicks, he was struck by the similarity between his underwater recordings and African tribal music. A Senegalese griot (drummer) confirmed the likeness and – amazingly – was able to pick individual whales from André’s recordings through their distinctive rhythmic structures."[via]
posted by dhruva (11 comments total)

That's awesome -- rather than try to scare the whales away, it's a passive system that listens for whales and warns the humans in the area. You'd use a similar system to hunt for enemy submarines.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 10:11 AM on September 12, 2008

I'm amazed that if this works one of the world's navies wouldn't already have discovered it, and possibly have commercialised it for non-military applications. Passive sonar sounds exactly like the sort of technology any submarining nation would be all over.

There are some related papers by Andre:
1 2 3
posted by roofus at 10:19 AM on September 12, 2008

Cool Papa Bell's link explains it exactly:
"The SOSUS components are now being used for various scientific projects, such as tracking the vocalizations of whales in various study projects"
posted by roofus at 10:22 AM on September 12, 2008

But will this help improve Twitter uptime?
posted by GuyZero at 10:51 AM on September 12, 2008 [1 favorite]

I remember when hyperlinks went to related content.
posted by cjorgensen at 11:04 AM on September 12, 2008

So will this enable us to eat more of them?
posted by blue_beetle at 11:17 AM on September 12, 2008

Knowing that active sonar will only further confuse the whales, he and the team have designed a passive system consisting of a chain of ultra-sensitive listening devices that detect whales round-the-clock, and transmit warnings to nearby vessels.

I think it's great that they are making efforts to minimize this kind of contact, but reading the above quote, I'm having this vision of a couple of whales coming across one of these microphones, and realizing that there might be a human on the other end, listening very carefully, they decide to exact some revenge:

[translated from whalespeak]

Whale 1: Do it, come on, it's going to be hilarious...

Whale 2: Ok, shut up, shut up, I'm gonna do it.

1: Oh yeah, this is going to be so awesome

2: I'm tellin' ya, shut up, I gotta concentrate

1: Dude, just let it rip

Whale 2 pulls up right next to the mic and takes deep breath

2: Hey, Mr Sonar Guy, can you hear me? Good, listen closely...

FUUUUCCCK YOOOOOUUUUUU!

And somewhere out there, a sonar man's earphones are blown off his head and he spends the next three days wandering around with no balance because his inner ear is shot.

Justice.
posted by quin at 2:02 PM on September 12, 2008 [1 favorite]

We live in a beautiful and awesome world.
posted by batmonkey at 2:16 PM on September 12, 2008

I hear the Japanese are working on an anti-whale collision system.
posted by agress at 5:50 PM on September 12, 2008

In attempting to unravel the chaotic rhythms of the sperm whale clicks, he was struck by the similarity between his underwater recordings and African tribal music.

"Chaotic"? "African tribal music"? WTF?

This is the only interesting passage in the whole story, and yet they fail to elaborate on it. I would like to know more about whales' rhythmic proclivities and what and how they might be encoding or communicating. Goddamn Internet.
posted by bricoleur at 9:10 PM on September 12, 2008

<>This is the only interesting passage in the whole story

I'm mildly suspicious of it; it looks like playing the ethnic card to emphasise green credentials. I can't see much reason why a Senegalese griot should be better at this than a similarly competent musician from some less exotic background.
posted by raygirvan at 8:54 AM on September 13, 2008