Do you do requests? (Image: Reinhard Dirscherl/Visuals Unlimited/Getty)

Just 2 minutes ago, a sperm whale swam by about 4 kilometres south of Cassis on the French Mediterranean coast. From my desk in London, I heard its clicks. Thanks to a new website, so can you.

The LIDO (Listening to the Deep Ocean Environment) site offers a live feed to 10 hydrophones sprinkled around European waters, and one in Canada. Several more are scheduled to come soon in Canada and in Asia.

The network’s primary aim is to record and archive long-term subsea noise so that researchers can study the effects of human activity on whales and dolphins.


It is the brainchild of Michel André, a bioacoustician at the Technical University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. He and his colleagues have spent the past 10 years placing hydrophones on the seabed, on existing research platforms that monitor earthquakes and tsunamis, for instance, or detect neutrino particles from space.

“These observatories were already cabled to shore for geophysics and astrophysics data monitoring, so we took advantage of the existing network to install real-time acoustic data hubs on them,” says André, who will demonstrate the system next month at a meeting on underwater acoustics technology in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Name that song

“The system is powered from the shore, and streams audio data to a server where the signals are analysed and published directly on the internet,” he says.

An algorithm developed by André’s laboratory filters the different frequencies in the signal to identify specific sounds, including the songs of 26 species of whales and dolphins, and noise from human activities such as shipping, wind farms, oil and gas drilling, and seismic testing.

“It’s the first time we have been able to monitor acoustic events on a large temporal and spatial scale,” says André. Until now, most experiments to monitor subsea noise have used temporary hydrophone installations and lasted only weeks.

Noise-shy sea life

With more hydrophones in the network the new system could reveal the effects of noise pollution on whales. Hydrophones can pick up sounds from baleen whales hundreds of kilometres away, so installations in different places could be used to triangulate an animal’s position and track its course. It should therefore be possible to determine if animals change course in response to bursts of noise, or alter their preferred routes because of new sources of noise like shipping routes or harbours.

“The data should help us understand whether long-term exposures, in areas with intense shipping, for instance, make animals move out of that area,” says Roger Gentry, an adviser for the E&P Sound and Marine Life Joint Industry Programme, set up in 2006 by the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers to investigate the effects of noise pollution on marine life.

“André deserves a lot of credit for thinking in broad terms and using modern technology to make the oceans and marine mammals more familiar and accessible to us all.”

André says that it would be possible to place hydrophones on buoys around industrial offshore platforms and include these in the network. They could then provide real-time alerts when whales and dolphins pass nearby, so that noisy operations could be put on hold.