Summary
Cetaceans spend most of their lives beneath the ocean surface, making much of their lives invisible to us. In this talk, we will explore how listening to them can open a window into this hidden world. Through examples from our research, we will see how different acoustic technologies allow us to study when and where cetaceans occur, their movements, and different aspects of their vocal and feeding behaviour. We will travel from traditional underwater acoustic recorders to a very different way of listening to the ocean: using submarine telecommunication cables. Through Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), these cables can become thousands of underwater sensing points, allowing us to detect whale sounds continuously and over tens of kilometres. We will see what this new perspective can tell us about whales and their movements, and finally explore how existing submarine cable networks could become a powerful new tool for monitoring whales in real time and ultimately helping to protect them from ship strikes.
Brief biography
Miriam Romagosa is a marine biologist and bioacoustician studying cetacean ecology and behaviour. Her research uses passive acoustic monitoring and complementary approaches to investigate whale occurrence, movements, behaviour and communication, as well as their interactions with human activities. She completed her PhD in Marine Sciences at the University of the Azores, focusing on underwater noise and the acoustic ecology of baleen whales, and subsequently conducted postdoctoral research assessing cetacean exposure to ship-strike risk and shipping noise. She is currently a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC) in Barcelona, where she works within a multidisciplinary team combining marine ecology, bioacoustics and fibre-optic sensing to investigate the potential of submarine telecommunication cables for monitoring whales and protecting them from ship strikes.