Marine Bioacoustics: Soundtracks the Future

: The primary goal of our project is to provide advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral investigators with a broad understanding of ocean acoustics as well as the techniques used to study the ecology of marine animals in situ. By bringing together many of the top researchers in marine bioacoustics, biological oceanography, and marine biology, we provide students with a unique opportunity to work side by side with world experts using state-of-the-art tools and technologies. A secondary goal of the project is to provide a setting for developing and testing new technologies. In this manner, it serves as a research magnet, attracting leading scientists to conduct their own research in a creative teaching and learning environment that catalyzes interactions across the various disciplines associated with Bioacoustical Oceanography. The specific objective of this project is to provide students with a broad understanding of the acoustic techniques used to study the distribution and behavior of marine animals in the context of their physical/chemical/biological environment. During the winter course, field trials were conducted along the Kohala Coast of Hawaii Island to evaluate the use of Wave Gliders deployed with hydrophones to localize and track vocalizing humpback whales. During the summer course, we conducted a multi-frequency acoustic survey of Saanich Inlet, BC, Canada, and used a MOCNESS for ground-truthing the acoustics. We also tracked the real-time, 3-D movement patterns of dock shrimp (Pandulas danae) carrying acoustic tags.