The North Coast Cetacean Society (NCCS), dubbed BC Whales, is the non-profit organisation tuning in to the conversations of the whales in the remote reaches of the British Columbia coastline. Its newest research camp at Fin Island was established in 2017 and is the site of a novel hydrophone project that employs sound as a means to understand which whales are in the area and what their movement patterns are and to interpret the nature of their different behaviours. In a photograph on the BC Whales website, the Fin Island cabin appears as an ant-sized blip perched on a narrow band of rock surrounded by the dense forest of the Great Bear region and above the gunmetal waters of the Kitimat Fjord System.

The fjord system is located about 500 kilometres (310 miles) north of Vancouver and is made up of a maze of channels and inlets that snake through the coastal waters of northern British Columbia. The traditional territory of coastal First Nations, this remote and complex ecosystem has been shared by humans and whales for hundreds of years and forms part of a core habitat for fin whales Balaenoptera physalus, humpback whales Megaptera novaeangliae and orca Orcinus orca. Squally Channel, a confined waterbody that plunges to a depth of 700 metres (2,300 feet), is where the hydrophones of the Fin Island project have been deployed in a novel configuration. The project is a collaboration between the Gitga’at First Nation and WWF-Canada and includes the work of Eric Keen, a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria. With the pilot phase of its first field season recently completed, the team has been engulfed by a host of new insights and is moving steadily towards its goal of being able to better understand, track and manage whales in the area based on sound alone.

So why exactly sound, and how does it work? ‘We’re very limited in our ability to understand life underwater when using light or infrared technology, but sound travels well and can extend our reach further, allowing us to probe into the world of whales,’ explains Ben Hendricks. A post-doctoral researcher from the University of Victoria working through a Mitacs ELEVATE Postdoctoral Fellowship, Ben is an astrophysicist by qualification. It is his statistical wizardry that is behind the Fin Island hydrophone project’s development. ‘We can listen in to an ocean soundscape through what is called passive acoustic monitoring, using hydrophones as submarine microphones that can detect and record sound waves as they move through water. We can also transmit sound into the sea through active acoustic probing,’ he says.

What makes the Fin Island project different from other passive acoustic monitoring programmes is that the unique placement of four hydrophones in a rectangle allows Janie, Ben and the team to pinpoint the location of a vocalising whale using triangulation. The hydrophones are placed on the sea floor at a depth of about 20 metres (65 feet) and are within 100 metres (330 feet) of the shore. Their recordings are picked up by radio antennas and transmitted to the Fin Island station, where they can be streamed and analysed in real time. This differs from other monitoring, where hydrophones are deployed from a boat as researchers move across the water to listen for whales. When a signal has been located on all four hydrophones, the localisation makes it possible to track that whale remotely. This places whales in the context of their environment, the region and in relation to each other, giving a ‘map’ of which whales are using Squally Channel, how they are using the area and where they move within the region during the year.

After the completion of the first testing phase of the hydrophone project I ask Janie what stood out from listening in on the whales of the area. Her answer speaks to her particular research animal of interest, the humpback whale. The males of the species are known for their haunting songs and in these rich waters their singing has been linked to their presence for feeding; indeed, this is where their ‘bubble-net’ feeding behaviour has been made famous in footage from documentaries like Blue Planet.

‘When Ben sent me the vocalisation of a humpback singing and the actual location of that whale, and was able to show that there was another whale that started to sing, and we could see the distance between those two whales, that’s when my heart rate went up,’ says Janie. ‘We don’t yet have specific information on where males sing, the distance between individuals when they are singing or whether there are particular features under the water that are attracting whales to sing in a certain location,’ she continues, her excitement palpable. ‘That’s a line of investigation we can follow up in the coming season of field work. It’s a huge question that remains to be answered and this method of triangulating whale locations using sound might well enable us to do so.’

Understanding behavioural idiosyncrasies such as these in the whales of Squally Channel is important because it will ultimately inform how they are managed. Avoiding ship strikes in highly utilised areas, for instance, relies on some idea of how whales move, and where. While their very unpredictability makes it difficult to find an easy solution for fin whales that are active in a shipping area, it is this kind of behavioural pattern that builds a more complete and defensible body of knowledge for the scientists scratching their heads about how best to advise on behalf of the whales in a region they must share with human beings.

This is the type of information that Janie and Ben, together with their collaborators Chris Picard, the acting director for the Gitga’at First Nation, and Hussein Alidina, the lead specialist for Oceans Conservation with WWF-Canada, want to make available. The power of these data is threefold: they can inform the best available scientific advice on how to manage whale populations in the region; they can equip First Nation communities with the information they need to make their own decisions about using the land and ocean in their territory; and they can open an underwater world to a wider community through the power of sound.

The project marks the start of several possible directions for improving our understanding of whales. For Janie, the most important of these is to work in conjunction with other bodies gathering knowledge to build a comprehensive overview of what whales are doing. ‘There are a number of hydrophone projects along the coast of British Columbia, listening in to the ecosystem in various ways. We’ve recently met with several of the other groups working in the region and I believe the next step is to work together with these hydrophone groups so that we are collecting standardised data along the coast using the same methodologies. This makes the data accessible to scientists to understand how whales are using the entire coast. If we really want to know what’s happening in the underwater world of whales, we need to look at the larger picture.’

It’s often in the details of how all of us – humans and animals alike – lead our lives on the planet that some kind of connection is established. As technology allows us to travel further, deeper and for longer in the ocean, we’re set to change all that. For whales, whose voices are perhaps most innately connected to the accurate telling of their story, ‘watching’ their lives play out through sound helps us do for the ocean what has been done for decades on land. Janie sums up why seemingly simple ecological insights might help us piece together this puzzle and connect us to creatures that live in the sea: ‘I think we will be able to predict the pathways of these whales over time, because, like us, they have preferred ways that they travel.’

Research. Connect. Protect. The byline on the landing page of the BC Whales website links three important concepts in these succinct words: connection is the bridge that enables people to use the information that research generates to protect the ocean we rely on.

If it seems a little odd that an analytical mind like Ben’s turned its attention from the stars in the sky to a world underwater, perhaps his musing on what led him to the Fin Island project helps us better understand the real power of this word ‘connection’. Much like Janie’s song on a red tape recorder, it was an encounter with whales that drew Ben to the sea. ‘I went kayaking and came across some grey whales…’ Ben trails off, lost a little in his reverie before continuing almost wistfully, ‘You should come visit here and hear what happens underwater. You’ll understand why I’ve stayed.’ These encounters sparked a fascination with what the American writer and naturalist Henry Beston called these ‘other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time’. Of course, not all of us might meet a whale and choose to dedicate our lives to understanding and protecting it and its fellows, as Janie and Ben have done. But giving the whales of British Columbia a voice might go beyond ecological interest and scientific innovation to connect us all to an emotional understanding of the sea.