Sound in the oceans: bioacoustics research on Galathea 3

Sound in the oceans: bioacoustics research on Galathea 3

Jakob Tougaard, Ph.D., The National Environmental Research Institute

The main aim of the project is to obtain high-quality recordings of sound from the oceans. To many animals (and scientists), sound is the most important source of information on the surroundings in the marine environment. Animals use sound to communicate, find each other, find their prey, find their way and avoid predators. The biology of these animals cannot be properly understood without knowledge of their sounds and the uses to which the animals put these sounds. Knowledge of animal sounds in the sea is, however, quite poor and often limited to species living in close proximity to coasts, which are easily accessible to scientists working with bioacoustics. The Galathea 3 expedition therefore offers a unique opportunity for collecting a large volume of data material, which will be tremendously important by themselves and as background for all other studies of background noise.. In the course of the expedition, we shall record the sounds of fish, seals, dolphins and whales with high-quality equipment. One independent study will, furthermore, target the recording of sounds produced by humpback whales in the Arabian SeaAtlantic, comparing songs from whales around Iceland with whale songs from the waters around the Cape Verde Islands., an isolated stock of which we have only limited scientific knowledge.