Detecting blue whales using fiber optic cables

It's important because we want to avoid ship strikes.

We think that ships that collide with whales is a main reason for, uh, whales being killed.

And then, of course, from a biological point of view, it's to get knowledge about their habitat changes, seasonal changes, how they migrate.

And we also want to find out what happens when several marine mammals are in the same area at the same time.

By using DAS, we have been able to monitor up to eight whales within a timeframe of five hours and see how they move around.

We can track them and see if they get closer, if they stay together, and how they behave.

What methods were used to detect whales previously?

Typically, what we have used so far is hydrophones, which are much better sensitivity.

Hydrophones have been developed over years.

Over the last 50 years, there have been huge improvements.

They can measure more accuracy and more precisely, and they can have ranges up to 50 to 100 kilometers, but they are points, or point recordings.

And for marine mammals, we are using less number of hydrophones, but very precise and sensitive hydrophones that can measure the signals, the vocalizations from whales or other marine mammals.

And they are relatively cheap, but not as cheap as a fiber optic cable.

So there are several options there that you can use.

Today, they're using a combination.

We are using both.

Distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS, cannot measure at the same sensitivity level, so we get worse data, but we get better data when it comes to spatial coverage because we can cover up to 100 kilometers at the same time.

So that's the advantage.

And what we have recently discovered is that they have also very good low frequency signal sensitivity.

So we think that that has not been possible with hydrophones.