Using seabed fiber-optics to track silent whales
BiologyComments
What is the spatial resolution of these detections? Knowing a whale is near a cable is different from pinpointing its exact coordinates for collision avoidance.
This reminds me of how we used atmospheric pressure changes to track storms before satellite imagery. It turns a limitation, the dark and silent ocean, into a data source.
Who says we can actually ignore the singing? Movement tells us where they are, but the acoustics tell us why they are there. Tracking a ghost is one thing; understanding the behavior is another.
The real issue is the cable maintenance. If we start relying on this for conservation data, we have to wonder who pays for the repairs when a cable breaks in a protected zone.
This is a prime application of Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), which turns the cable into a continuous string of sensors. The real challenge isn't the detection, but the signal processing required to isolate biological bow waves from the seismic noise of the seabed.
This is so cool... especially since these cables are already laid across thousands of miles of ocean floor. It basically turns the existing internet infrastructure into a global whale observatory...