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Seeing Voices

WHOI marine ecologist Mark Baumgartner reviews whale vocalizations on a public web site with Julianne Gurnee, an analyst with the Passive Acoustic Research Group at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole. The web site hosts data collected in near real-time by autonomous buoys and gliders carrying a WHOI-developed acoustic instrument that runs whale detection software Baumgartner developed. The whales Gurnee and Baumgartner monitor are all endangered, and threatened by ship strikes and fishing gear entanglements. “The real-time data lets us know when animals are present, so we can manage human activities around them as part of our efforts to conserve them,” said Baumgartner.(Photo by Jayne Doucette, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)