diving business and tourism operator Beneath the Bay<\/a> with her husband Michael.<\/p>\n\u201cYou may not be able to see them, but you can always hear the whales when they\u2019re passing,\u201d she tells Region.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs long as they\u2019re talking to each other and having a sing-along, you\u2019ll hear them from most of our dive sites.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou will often see them on our surface intervals \u2013 the divers will get to see the whales passing by as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2024, the pair were asked to install a hydrophone (a recording device that works underwater) to help track the mammals\u2019 migration past their coastal town.<\/p>\n
A second was installed the following year.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all part of an ongoing study involving researchers from Griffith University.<\/p>\n
One of those involved is Doctor Olaf Meynecke, manager of the university\u2019s Whales and Climate Program.<\/p>\n
Batemans Bay is the most southerly location the researchers are examining.<\/p>\n
Other devices have been set up in places such as Sydney, Cairns and Lady Elliot Island.<\/p>\n
Doctor Meynecke says each location is carefully chosen to give researchers the best chance of recording whale songs.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey [local dive operators] help us find a reliable location \u2026 in terms of currents and waves and accessibility.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost people might not know, but deploying any kind of instrument in the ocean is extremely difficult.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you want to go any deeper than the standard diving depths, it gets quite tricky because you have to find a way to retrieve the instrument and also ensure it has enough weight so it doesn\u2019t move.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once the devices are installed, it\u2019s a waiting game.<\/p>\n
Each device\u2019s battery runs for about six months \u2013 collecting the sounds of underwater life \u2013 and (most importantly) whale songs \u2013 before being retrieved by the dive operators.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt stores all the data \u2013 that\u2019s why it\u2019s so important to get it back!\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Four](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Batemans-bay--900x1200.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Researchers say the recordings indicate whale migrations are changing, with more staying in southern waters. Photo: Olaf Meynecke.<\/p>\n
A combination of an algorithm and \u201cmanual labour\u201d is then used as they sort through the recordings.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis round generated, at least, seven to eight terabytes of data. It\u2019s going to be a lot of files to go through \u2013 it\u2019s already a storage issue,\u201d Dr Meynecke says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe go through displaying the different software, which means you can see the sound as an image. We\u2019re trying to extract the ones that we haven\u2019t heard before, [meaning] the frequencies that are now.\u201d<\/p>\n
As they identify which ones are humpback whale songs, a more rounded picture of the whales\u2019 presence in coastal waters develops.<\/p>\n
Doctor Meynecke believes there\u2019s been a shift in the mammals\u2019 migration patterns, with whales leaving for their migration earlier as ice melts and some of the whales staying off the South Coast (compared to their counterparts further north).<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is definitely a bit of an increase in presence, even in August, but there\u2019s still a clear, distinct difference between the northern and southern migration.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe haven\u2019t got that on the South Coast \u2013 it just has whales all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
He says these early results are echoed in people seeing more whales (and earlier in the season), but that isn\u2019t a complete picture.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t do long-term visual sighting surveys, so we\u2019re often missing the fine adjustments the whales are undertaking to mitigate and adapt to climate change,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we\u2019re interested in seeing is shifts in migration timing and if there\u2019s any shifts in their presence and absence.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also says it\u2019s too early to confirm what is driving the changes (and further rounds of their study are still to be completed), but believes it\u2019s down to a combination of factors.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey might have been doing this, 30 to 40 years ago, when there were just not too many whales. \u2026 But back in the days when there were only a few thousand whales, everyone probably moved up north,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow, when there\u2019s more whales, more can stay behind, save that energy and wait for the breeders to come back during the southern migration.\u201d<\/p>\n
Original Article published by Claire Sams on About Regional<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Several hydrophones have been stationed off the Australian coast, helping researchers learn more about how whale migrations are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399682,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[64,63,128,338],"class_list":["post-399681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/hydrophone-batemans-bay-april-2025-1200x810.jpg\")
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