Join Amelie as she shares the results of her recent publication using the Covid pandemic to listen to whale calls & vessel sounds in Iceland.

For the final webinar of the series, we are joined by Whale Wise! Whale Wise aim to promote a harmonious relationship between humans and whales through scientific research and public engagement. This week Amelie shares the results of their recent research paper: Impact of whale-watching vessels on humpback whale calling behavior on an Icelandic foraging ground during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This study, led by Amelie, compared pre-pandemic summer months (2018) with pandemic (2020) conditions to determine the reductions in vessel activity and changes in calling behaviour of humpback whales in North Iceland.

One of Whale Wise's key projects is to find out how humpback whales may change their behavior in response to whale-watching vessels, particularly in Skjálfandi Bay. One way they might react is acoustically, changing their calling behavior, since whale-watching vessels make sounds underwater that can be heard by the whales. Discovering if whales do actually change their calls due to whale-watching vessels, is usually difficult to answer, due to a lack of comparable time without whale-watching (in science this comparable time is called a control). You could compare the calling behavior of the whales during whale-watching with nighttime, winter, or times when there is a storm, and no whale-watching is happening. However, one must consider that the whales might just call differently because their behavior could be different at night, or in winter. And storms themselves make a lot of noise, so these occasions are still not truly comparable to periods in which whale-watching would occur.

However, Whale Wise recently had the opportunity to have a suitable control: during the Covid-19 pandemic the vessel traffic was reduced drastically, and they used this time to find out how the whales react to the vessel noise. They deployed a hydrophone (underwater recording device) during the pandemic in 2020 and used recordings of 2018 as a non-pandemic comparison.

We want our talks to be accessible for everyone so optional subtitles will be generated during the webinar and we are asking you to pay what you can. Your donation will support marine conservation in Scotland. Thank you.