All News

Off the island of Tutuila in American Samoa, in September 2016 the crew of Fleur de Passion was treated to a live concert of humpback whale songs. It was enough to plunge the yoyo (manual hydrophone) in the water to listen to these strange monotonous chants coming from the oceans, with the clatter of the seabed in the background. Streamed to the Laboratory of Bioacoustics Applications of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona, these recordings are part of the program 20'000 Sounds Under the Seas. They are then analyzed by biologist Michel André and his team, who then feed their project to map the noise pollution of the oceans. Not the whales’ sounds, of course, but that generated by human activity.

Click here to listen to humpback whales songs off the coast of Samoa