You’ve heard of things that go bump in the night, but what about things that go “twang” in the ocean?
Researchers think they’ve solved a longstanding mystery about a weird sound that has been recorded in the ocean for years. First heard and recorded in 2014 in the western part of the Pacific ocean, the sound is called a “biotwang.” It turns out to be vocalizations from Bryde’s whale, a species that treks huge distances through the ocean.
A team from the NOAA Pacific Island Fisheries Science Center said Bryde’s whales live in warm and tropical ocean regions, but biologists don’t know very much about their habits, and why they travel along the routes they choose. The researchers say they’ve connected the “biotwang” sound to the whales, and this has convinced them that there is a population of the creatures living in the western North Pacific, but that they are distributed broadly. The scientists think the whales move from one area to the other based on conditions in the ocean.
What does the biotwang sound like? You can listen to a sample here. It is reminiscent of synthesized music, with a stuttering, buzzing sound that increases and decreases in pitch. Though it is a natural sound made by living creatures, it sounds very like a kind of digital distortion, such as what happens when voice and video calls lose their close connection.
Humans first picked up the biotwang while researchers were surveying underwater sounds in the Mariana Archipelago for a project under the auspices of Oregon State University. At first, the researchers thought it must be the call of a baleen whale. During the broad survey of marine mammal sounds, the scientists spent a month recording and during that time saw 10 Bryde’s whales. They were able to correlate “biotwangs” to nine of the 10 individual whales observed.
But the team wanted to be very sure. So they turned to recordings from equipment installed under the ocean 23 years ago off the California coast that was placed there to pick up and record whatever there was to be heard.
The team tried to correlate recorded biotwangs with the movement of animal populations over time in the ocean, but there was so much data to go through it could have taken forever. But artificial intelligence (AI) sped up the process, according to NOAA. The agency said it managed to finish in hours a job that would have taken years without the technology.
