![]() ![]() ![]() So one day, while on a research cruise, Moore contacted the New Bedford Whaling Museum, where he serves on the board, and offered up the collection. “We all felt the archive needed to be curated in a museum of quality.” “Housing an acoustic collection was overwhelming,” Moore said. But as WHOI researchers continued their painstaking work to digitize Watkins’ data after his death in 2004, they worried about properly preserving the boxes of reel-to-reel tapes, hand-built transistors and other artifacts he left behind. “The idea of the database and the digitization was really his baby,” said Michael Moore, director of the Marine Mammal Center at WHOI. Since the 1980s, Watkins had hoped to make his trove of sounds - which eventually included recordings donated by fellow researchers who wanted to contribute to the archive Watkins was amassing - available to the scientific community and the public. Eventually Watkins would receive a doctorate in whale biology from the University of Tokyo, defending his thesis in Japanese. The data led to numerous discoveries, allowing him, for example, to attribute certain calls to species such as sperm whales and fin whales. He also developed some of the first wildlife tags - precursors to high-tech marine mammal tags of today, which track sound and motion and are applied with suction cups. He was the first to use “arrays,” or arrangements of multiple hydrophones that help pinpoint sources of sound, to record animals. Watkins’ techniques laid the groundwork for the study of marine mammals in the wild. “In those days, almost every animal contact was brand-new exploration,” he said in a 2000 interview. Watkins and his colleagues would chase aquatic sounds across the globe, from the waters of Alaska to Antarctica. His “rowboat recorder” allowed researchers to approach and record marine life from small boats, which was much less disruptive to animals’ natural behaviors. Navy, Watkins shrank and adapted these technologies. Hydrophones and amplifiers were large and not designed for use at sea. The first recording of any marine mammal - a beluga whale, in 1949 - was made by Bill Schevill using a dictaphone, a cousin of Edison’s phonograph. ![]() He came to marine mammal science indirectly when, in 1958, WHOI hired him to build tape recorders that could withstand conditions on boats.īack then, underwater recording was a clunky business. By then, he could speak more than 30 African languages but had never used his ear for speech to interpret the otherworldly voices of whales, dolphins and seals. After studying anthropology in the U.S., he set up a radio station in Liberia. Raised by Christian missionary parents, Watkins grew up in Guinea, West Africa (called French Guinea at the time). In short, they opened human ears to the oceans. Over a 40-year career at WHOI, he and his mentor and research partner, biologist Bill Schevill, captured the first recordings (known as “vouchers” to scientists) of dozens of species. camera icon © COURTESY OF THE WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTIONĪ pioneer in the field of bioacoustics, Bill Watkins made many of the recordings with hydrophones - underwater microphones - he built himself. This data is a boon for researchers studying marine mammals, but the archive could also provide clues about the state of the world’s oceans, which grow louder every year. Launched over the summer, the interface allows scientists and casual listeners to sample around 16,000 clips (including dozens of “best of” cuts) and 1,800 complete master tapes. Though transfer of the materials to the museum isn’t yet complete, much of the content is now freely available through a website developed by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Collected over seven decades, the archive was acquired in 2015 by the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which is located within the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park in Massachusetts. Watkins Collection of Marine Mammal Sound Recordings and Data, the largest store of underwater audio recordings ever compiled. Thousands of hours of these sounds are contained in the William A. camera icon © ANTONY SOUTER/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO Percy Elton Cowen’s painting of a sperm whale upsetting a whaling boat is part of the collection at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |