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Ready, Aim, Tag

February 14, 2013

Nicholas Macfarlane uses a carbon-fiber pole to put a DTAG (digital acoustic recording tag) on a long-finned pilot whale in the Straight of Gibraltar off Morocco. DTAGs, which were invented at WHOI by Mark Johnson and Peter Tyack, attach via suction cups and record the sounds animals make and hear, as well as how they move underwater. Macfarlane, who is an MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student, and WHOI postdoc Frants Jensen, deploy tags on several animals at once to get a better picture on how they are interacting underwater—particularly in response to human-made noise and disturbances.(Photo by Frants Jensen, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This research was performed under NMFS Marine Mammal Permit number 14241.)