Irish engineers and researchers are learning more and more from locating and listening in on the cetaceans – the most vocal of sea creatures – and it's thanks to advances in acoustic hardware and software that allows this access. A Galway conpaby is at the forefront of these advances: Biospheric Enginnering. They build the underwater microphones, or hydrophones, and link them to computer programmes that process the sound files they generate.
Simon Berrow of the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group (IWDG) is fascinated by the the complex view of cetacean life generated by various projects around the coast. "The more we do, the more amazine we find things are here," he says.