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> The experts claim to easily be able to confirm, based on morphology and acoustics, that the whales are a new species That's pretty cool. I would have thought
by jolmg 6y ago
> The experts claim to easily be able to confirm, based on morphology and acoustics, that the whales are a new species
That's pretty cool. I would have thought that confirming you've seen something that no-one else on the planet has would be a somewhat difficult task. I wonder if there's like a world-recognized central database where this morphology and acoustics data of all species are organized for easy comparison.
> These samples were taken as eDNA - a new, fancy technique in which gallons of the surrounding water is captured and filtered for bits of DNA which can then be cross-checked against the DNA of known species.
Also pretty cool. I didn't expect them to leave so many pieces of themselves in their wake for something like this to be possible.
- Zenst 6y agoBeen a lot of headway in the past decade in Passive Audio Monitoring, which is opening up a whole new view of the environments, like the sea. The whole aspect of cheaper tech to make such a set-up is also opening this realm up more to civilian use. https://www.pamguard.org/ https://www.pamguard.org/ https://www.wwf.org.uk/project/conservationtechnology/acoustic-monitoring https://www.wwf.org.uk/project/conservationtechnology/acoust...
- readicculus 6y agoThat and ai, manually combing through 50tb of audio data was previously not possible. Have a colleague who just finished up a project detecting these sorts of signals using CNNs, forget what species he was looking at, but results were quite good.
- Isamu 6y agoAccording to Wikipedia there are only 89 species of cetaceans, including dolphins and porpoises, so it is a short list to compare with.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> I would have thought that confirming you've seen something that no-one else on the planet has would be a somewhat difficult task It would be. But confirming that what you've seen doesn't fit anything that has been described and categorized as a species, rather than that no one has ever seen it before, is a lot easier.