Live hydrophones: listening to cetaceans in real time

What if you plugged your headphones into the ocean? Networks of hydrophones (underwater microphones) stream the sounds of the sea live, sometimes the song of a killer whale or the click of a sperm whale. The widget above brings together the best listening platforms, live or archived.

Orcasound and OrcaLab cover the waters of the killer whales of the north-east Pacific; Ocean Networks Canada streams the data from its cabled observatories; the libraries at Cornell and Woods Hole archive decades of marine mammal recordings.

What can you hear? Clicks, whistles and songs

Through headphones, three broad families of sound can be told apart. Echolocation clicks, short and repeated, let odontocetes (killer whales, dolphins, sperm whales) “see” by sound. Modulated whistles, among them the well-known signature whistle unique to each common bottlenose dolphin, carry communication. Finally, the structured songs of male humpback whales, which change from season to season.

These recordings feed passive acoustic monitoring (PAM), a non-invasive method that detects, counts and tracks cetaceans without disturbing them, even at night or in poor visibility.

Going further: listen to our sound library with spectrograms, compare the acoustic profile of the species and discover passive acoustic monitoring (PAM).