Boating Industry Canada
JASCO Applied Sciences, an environmental science and engineering company, has developed a world-class underwater listening station. Installed in the Salish Sea, the station tracks endangered whales and measures underwater noise emissions.
Each of the two observation frames have eight underwater microphones, called hydrophones, that are installed 190 metres (620 feet) below the shipping lanes of Boundary Pass. The observation frames are positioned between the inbound and outbound shipping lanes, and use the hydrophones to detect and triangulate the positions of calling marine mammals and ships transiting overhead. This ability allows counting of the individual calling animals within pods of whales passing the listening station.
Around 50 kilometres south of Vancouver - this location was chosen because Boundary Pass is a major route for commercial vessels but is within critical habitat of the Southern Resident killer whales.
Commissioned by Transport Canada under the federal government’s five-year Whales Initiative, this $9.5-million listening station project aims to support the protection and recovery of endangered Southern Resident killer whales and to provide data to accurately evaluate noise-reduction technologies applied to ships. JASCO is operating the system and working with the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority-led Enhancing Cetacean Habitat and Observation (ECHO) Program to analyze and distribute the results.
JASCO’s OceanObserver intelligent monitoring systems are the brains of the listening station. The devices are designed for acquiring and processing large volumes of acoustic data in real time on devices such as ocean gliders, buoys, and cabled observatories like the listening station. The OceanObservers are connected by 2.8 kilometres of subsea fibre-optic cables to a shore station on Saturna Island, transmitting over 1 terabyte of data to shore each day. The sound recordings, together with underwater video and oceanographic sensor data, are reported online in real time.
The whale detection results include the species, locations, and travelling directions of the animals. These will help reveal the distribution and activity of animals in this area, including Southern Resident killer whales. In the future it is hoped these results will feed alert systems to notify approaching vessels when animals are present and in their path.
Article originally published here.