Research >Tracking Fin and Blue Whales with a Seafloor Seismic Network

As part of the Keck experiment, my research group operated a subseafloor seismic network on the Endeavour segment of the Juan de Fuca ridge in collaboration with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and the University of Oregon. The network was designed to record local earthquakes but also recorded an outstanding data set of blue and fin whale calls. During this preliminary analysis of the earthquake data, it was noted that the seismic records included a very extensive data set of high quality fin and blue whale vocalizations. The student annalists reported almost daily sequences of fin whale vocalizations from Fall to early Spring and without a systematic search over half a dozen sequences of blue whale calls were also noted. Examples of the seismic records for the calls are shown below. You can also hear them in my 1-hour audio of the Keck seismic data (there are explanatory notes)

An example of a fin whale call recorded on four seafloor stations. The call comprises a single 20-Hz chirp but you see it several times on each trace because the sound take different paths to station - a direct path that arrives first and echos that reflect back and forth from the seafloor and sea surface (Full Sized Version)


A few years ago two undergraduate students at the University of Washington, David Englund and Elizabeth McHugh, and a high school teacher, Carol Dundorf, who participated in the REVEL teachers-at-sea program worked to localize the whale calls using manual techniques.

My group is now funded by the Office of Naval Research for a collaborative project with Rick Thompson at the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, British Columbia. We are investigating the potential correlation between whale tracks, enhanced zooplankton concentrations and hydrothermal vents above the Juan de Fuca Ridge with the long-term goal is to understand the influences of globally distributed hydrothermal plumes on the trophic ecology of the deep ocean.

At the UW we have developed an automatic algorithm to track fin whales and graduat student Dax Soule is now applying it to the three-year Keck data set. One interesting result is the highly seasonal distribution of fin whale calls with most calls in the winter months.

Histogram showing the number of fin whale calls per day between summer 2003 and summer 2006 (Full Sized Version)


At present we have about 100 whale tracks lasting for intervals from ~1 hour to tens of hours and we anticipate that the final data set will include 300 whale tracks. Examples of whale tracks are shown below.

Composite plot of all monthly fin whale tracks for October 2003, December 2003, February 2004 and April 2004.  Each track has a different color and black lines are used to connect portions of the tracks where there is a break in calling and the whales position is interpolated. The seismic network is shown by yellow squares and the plot is rotated so the y-axis follows the ridge axis. (Full Sized Version)

To learn more about this project to can look at an expanded version of the 2009 Annual Report submitted to ONR or download poster (9 MBytes) Dax Soule presented at the 18th Biennial Conference of the Society for Marine Mammalogy in Quebec