CETI Whale Tag

Over the past decade, the importance of bioacoustics associated with diverse marine life has become the focus of increasing research. While fixed acoustic devices play important roles in characterizing localized soundscapes, animal-worn devices recording audio alongside physiological metrics provide richer portals to understanding cetacean communication and characterizing sounds in their environment. To facilitate scaling such data collection, we present an open-source sensor tag that can be deployed on marine animals to record high-quality audio synchronized with an extensible suite of behavioral and environmental sensors. Its hardware and software are designed to facilitate rapidly prototyping new capabilities and curating multimodal datasets for machine learning applications. The current implementation is tailored to investigating sperm whale communication and biology. It features four suction cups, three high-bandwidth synchronized hydrophones for audio analysis including directionality, GPS logging and transmission, and sensors for pressure, motion, orientation, temperature, and light. It is accompanied by open-source designs, fabrication tutorials, and software. Lab-based experiments characterize and validate performance including shear adhesion forces, withstanding pressures equivalent to 560m depths, battery life up to 16.8 hours, audio sensitivity of -205 dB re FS/μPa with a 96 dB dynamic range, multi-threaded data acquisition, drone-based deployments, and GPS-based recoveries. Field experiments record sperm whale vocalizations and behaviors spanning 10 deployments, 44 hours of recording, 20 dives, and up to 967 m depths. Altogether, this platform aims to advance the understanding of marine animal biology and communication within the rapidly evolving and intersecting areas of robotics, bioacoustics, and machine learning.