Image

Calling All Whales

In 1949, WHOI biologist William Schevill (right) and his wife Barbara Lawrence used a crude hydrophone and a dictating machine to record beluga whales from a small boat in the Saguenay River in Canada, pioneering a new field of marine mammal bioacoustics. Bill Watkins (left) joined him at WHOI in 1958 and began developing what would become seminal scientific instruments to record animal sounds from small vessels at sea. Their four-decade collaboration revolutionized the field and amassed a treasure trove of marine mammal recordings, which are now archived at the New Bedford Whaling Museum and available to researchers around the world. (Photo courtesy of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Archives)