Underwater acoustics

Everyone knows that whales communicate with beautiful songs and dolphins with funny clicks.

However, did you know that the vast majority of marine organisms actually make sounds?

Let's start with a practical example

The species detection

If I ask you how to carry out a study of the harbour porpoise presence in the BPNS, what would you tell me? You might answer something related to fins photo-identification. However, there is a simpler alternative when using microphones that record the underwater sounds. And later in a office, just using a computer and the PAMGuar program, you'll be able to look for the target animal.

I know I know... that explanation wasn't very complete, so let me explain myself better.

Harbour porpoise click (Cosentino, M. et al., 2019)

The PAMGuard program detects the clicks of animals as long as we give it the appropriate parameters, something like their acoustic ID. For example, in our porpoise case it would be: