So, Emma, before we get into the experiment itself, why is understanding whale hearing actually such an important scientific question?

Yeah, so... apart from learning really cool things about amazing animals, marine mammals like whales, they use sound as a way to communicate with each other, as well as to, you know, assess what's happening in their environment, you know, navigating and finding food.

The ocean is really vast and sound travels really well in it.

And it gets pretty dark pretty quickly.

So they're not necessarily relying on their eyesight to, for those behaviors but you know increasingly human-made noise like you know military and research sonar surveying for oil and gas you know vessels crisscrossing the oceans and even construction is almost polluting the ocean with with sound like we're polluting it with other things And so to understand how these sounds would impact marine mammals like whales, you kind of need to understand what their hearing range is, what frequencies they're going to be sensitive to.

And humpbacks in particular are of concern because they A lot of their really critical habitats are in the same places that humans are really heavily using for recreation and transport and industry and military, etc.

So whilst, you know, it's not as sensitive, when they're going from what, 18 to 22 is expected, why is that significant? What does it mean for the whales and the way we think about them and the way we interact with them?

Yeah, exactly.