Image

Alert to Strandings

June 28, 2017

WHOI Summer Student Fellow Sam Walkes (center) helps engineer Alex Bocconcelli (right) prepare an underwater recording device for deployment in Wellfleet Harbor, as assistant harbormaster John Milliken watches for boat traffic. The hook-shaped harbor is a hot spot for marine mammal mass strandings. Walkes, an incoming senior at Bowdoin College, is working with Bocconcelli and biologist Laela Sayigh on a project to detect and record the calls of dolphins that enter the harbor. In the future, a similar device could alert rescuers to divert animals back out to sea before they become stranded on shore. (Photo by Véronique LaCapra, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)