AI Identifies Mysterious Whale Calls

All of the NOAA science centers use acoustics to study marine mammal sounds, like whale calls. We estimate now that we have at least a petabyte of acoustic data-that's an astronimcal 1,000 terabytes of data.

On this episode of Dive In with NOAA Fisheries, we're going to hear a whale call that was finally, successfully attributed to a protected but enigmatic whale species. And we'll hear how, with help from Google, machine learning and AI is now helping identify these whales-and many others-among thousands of hours of recorded ocean sounds. We speak with Dr. Ann Allen, a research oceanographer for the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center. She's one of the authors of a new study linking biotwang to the Bryde's whale, a baleen whale we don't know much about.

Knowing when and where these calls occur will help us monitor and protect this unique population, which is vulnerable to impacts from climate change.