Today the Orca Network sighting team was working like a well-oiled machine. The steady stream of sighting reports from dedicated citizen scientists on the Orca Network Facebook page made it easy for co-founder Howard Garrett to anticipate when to listen for whales on the Bush Point hydrophone — the latest node in a network of underwater microphones that can be monitored live through the Orcasound app.
This afternoon, J pod and L87 were on their way out of Puget Sound and ended up being audible on the Bush Point hydrophone from about 16:00-17:45. Here we present the raw data from this event — the first time that SRKWs have been heard live through this new node — along with a little bioacoustic analysis.
Raw data:
- Shared Google spreadsheet of Bush Point hydrophone observations.
- Start time of relevant archive directory (Unix datetime = 1544229019):
GMT: Saturday, December 8, 2018 12:30:19 AM
Your time zone: Friday, December 7, 2018 4:30:19 PM GMT-08:00
- Amazon’s S3 bucket with raw HLS segments
- M3U8 manifest file (playback in an HLS reference player)
- 1.5 hour, 43 Mb mp3 file from 16:30:19-18:04:14 (derived from the HLS segments)
Analysis:
There were a few intense calls (at 7:47, 41:15, 41:45, & 1:18:15), but most were quite faint and many were drowned out by passing boats, gurgling water noises (as the tide fell and currents increased), and in the end a ship. There were many S1 calls, a few S10s, S4s, and maybe the tail of an S18.
