Have you ever wondered what secrets lie in sea depths? It is known that scientists have been straining their eyes on a wedge including such a secret for the last decade – a sound made by an emanating force inside the Mariana Trench. This phenomenon is referred to as the ‘biotwang’ with affection as it sounds very annoying.
The Enigmatic Ocean Song
This is followed by a low, deep grunting sound, which is quickly succeeded by a thin squeak as though nothing explains the noise. Lauren Harrell, a data scientist on the Google Research team on AI for Social Good explains this and says ‘You’ve got this low-frequency stuff, almost like someone moaning…Then you have this higher-frequency stuff which to me sounds like the original star trek ship, of a ‘bip boo, bip boo’ type.’
This strange surrounding sounded for the first time in 2014 during the works of underwater sounding, which disoriented many of the scientists, in the simplest of actions. Is it a new organism? Is it an off-the-map geologic structure? Or, more likely, is it something… other?
The Hunt for the Sound’s Source
Apprehending who might produce such exotic ocean spy sounds is not an easy task. It takes events to be in perfect correspondences, like when the sound is captured by a device which is pointed to an animal at the same time that the sound is stamped. Ann Allen is a research oceanographic scientist at NOAA, she says: “It’s a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a reasonable amount of luck.”.
But by some stroke of coincidence, in this case, the scientist’s luck was on the ‘good’ side.
Sightings of a Bryde’s whale, Balaenoptera edeni, were also noticed on nine occasions during whale surveying activities in the vicinity of the Mariana Islands, and this coincided with a hearing of the biotwang. And this is not by happenstance and that it is a quantum leap forward.
Bryde’s Whales: The Silent Awakened Formerly Bastioned
So it is not much of a surprise that the few available studies on the bryde’s whales are restricted and uncomprehensive. Diminished from egregious and unattainable expanses over the wide spans of oceans, these animals had been able to keep their vocal prowess under wraps; until now. The finding not only unraveled the mystery of biotwang, but it also led to further and easier investigations of the pod bearers of information.
AI to the Rescue
Analysing the 200,000 hours worth of underwater biotwang recordings made more sense than looking for more biotwangs. This is artificial intelligence. Google came up with an AI tool that enabled them to turn auditory data into graph forms called spectrograms helping them employ image recognition to look for specific sound wave frequencies trapped within mascular apparatus.
This also helped them to detail the movement and activity of the Bryde’s whale population more than ever before. Climate was determined to be a factor affecting the distribution of the whales’ populations, more so during periods of strong El Nino when the fish they depended on dispersed to other regions.
Conservation Consequences
It is important to investigate the movement and calls of Bryde’s whales as it will determine how they are preserved. Going forward as global warming wears on, such whales might have to look for food in places far from where they reside. Linking the activities of the species with its environmental conditions, scientists endeavor to predict and ameliorate the consequences of climate alterations on these great creatures in a better way.
The Advancement of Subsea Sound Communication
Although AI technology has introduced a new dimension to the field of marine acoustics, it cannot be said that it is perfect in every way. There are some limitations in this algorithm, such as that it can only search for already defined frequency sounds, and that whale sound patterns may evolve genetically and culturally over time. On the other hand, any scientist in any corner of the world can help in this campaign because these tools are in the public domain and in most cases democratize the source of these tools.
In the words Olaf Meynecke, baleen whale specialist from Griffith University “We appear to be living in an age where we are so removed from or even have no opportunity to appreciate the beautiful and perhaps strange sound scape beneath the oceans. I think it is about time we flattened that structure.”
