Good morning on this frown-inducing Friday.

A listening device, slightly smaller than a football, rests on the sea floor of the New York Bight, the body of water that stretches between Montauk Point in Long Island and Cape May, N.J.

The contraption is named Melville.

It’s an appropriate moniker for what it does: It tracks whales in New York’s busy waters by listening, processing and sending data via satellite to scientists in near-real time.

Since last summer, the device has been detecting whale calls as part of the largest survey of New York’s whales.

Scientists at the Wildlife Conservation Society and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the largest independent ocean research center in the United States, hope to better understand where whales are in relation to shipping lanes and wind-farm development in and around one of the nation’s busiest shipping ports.