What is it about?

Fiber-optic cables on the seafloor can pick up the sounds made by whales using distributed acoustic sensing, allowing researchers to track them. However, this only works when whales are vocalizing, leaving silent animals undetected. Our study introduces a new approach: instead of listening for vocalizations, we detect the pressure and water movement that a whale's body creates as it swims. Using this approach, we identify silent whales passing within 40 meters of the cable. We validate the method using ships as test cases. This opens a new window into monitoring the ocean's most endangered species, even when they are silent.

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Why is it important?

A major implication is that we can use this to detect and track all whales, ranging from toothed whales to the more commonly studied baleen whales. The potential for detecting and tracking toothed whales is particularly interesting, as these normally vocalize in the high frequency band outside what is normally captured by distributed acoustic sensing. In addition to the obvious and useful application for marine mammal observations, these results open up numerous other applications related to marine environmental studies.

Perspectives

I hope this article sparks new research into the low-frequency signals related to swimming whales. I also hope we can use data from this and other DAS datasets to further our understanding of these signals and the physics behind them, and hopefully advance whale research along the way. Carrying out the research and writing it with my co-author Martin Landrø was also a great pleasure, as always.

Robin Andre Rørstadbotnen
Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Detecting silent whales using seabed fiber-optic cables, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2603077123.
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