Conference at the Saint Gilles Nautical Base, Reunion

On Friday 21 August, ABYSS held an evening of public talks at the Saint-Gilles Nautical Base, very insightful to the OCEAN EARS project research. Four members of the team presented their research.

Nadège Gandilhon, Doctor of Marine Biology and marine mammal observer, presented One Ocean, One Whale, One Future. Great whales cross entire oceans on their migrations and meet the same threats everywhere. How sensitive are they to human-made noise at sea, and what does it do to their behaviour, communication and ecology? From the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, research is helping to understand these pressures and to share practical solutions between regions.

Lucie Jean-Labadye, doctoral student in bioacoustics and AI, asked what artificial intelligence can do for whales. Passive acoustic monitoring lets researchers observe cetaceans at a distance, but campaigns lasting months or years produce far more recordings than anyone can analyse by hand. AI is becoming a key tool for detecting and classifying calls, for following populations, studying behaviour and assessing human impact, with promising results and open challenges.

Yann Doh, Doctor of Bioacoustics, spoke about how the interactions between singing whales can be studied. In autumn and winter the acoustic exchanges between humpbacks are intense and central to their breeding, yet most studies of song have relied on recordings of lone singers. ABYSS has developed a recording system that captures several singers at once, and the first results show that songs are not fixed: individuals influence one another in subtle ways.

Olivier Adam, bioacoustician and professor at Sorbonne University, asked whether whales like music. Cetaceans use sound in every part of their lives, and for some species we borrow musical words, songs and leitmotifs, to describe their calls. Male humpbacks arrange their sounds into phrases repeated for fifteen to twenty minutes at a stretch. Is that enough to say they are sensitive to music, or that they have a musical ear?