Michelle Fournet is a National Geographic Explorer, an assistant research professor of marine biology at the University of New Hampshire, a behavioral ecologist, and the director of the Sound Science Research Collective. As a bioacoustician, Fournet specializes in listening to the world’s oceans and the marine animals who live there. Her research focuses on investigating how animals communicate underwater and how anthropogenic (man-made) activities are changing ocean ecosystems. Fournet is particularly interested in marine mammals, including humpback whales, harbor porpoises, harbor seals, and bearded seals. Fournet’s research experience spans pole-to-pole with expeditions and projects ranging from Antarctica to the Alaskan Arctic, and Hawaii to the Caribbean. However, most of Fournet’s research focuses on the calling behavior of humpback whales in Southeast Alaska. She was a longtime resident of Juneau, Alaska, where the Sound Science Research Collective was founded, and has spent over 15 years listening to the voices of Alaska’s whales.
A Sense of Voice: identifying individual variation in humpback whale contact calls
Michelle’s work seeks to identify whether humpback whales have a unique sense of ‘voice’ embedded in their contact calls and to answer the question: “Can whales identify each other by the sound of their voices?” For humpback whales, who are among the most vocal whales on the planet, relationships, social interactions, breeding, and foraging strategies are facilitated through sound. In the light–limited ocean, a silent whale is invisible. In Alaska, humpback whales maintain relationships lasting for years, presumably finding one another through sound. Across age and sex class, humpback whales produce discrete contact calls known as a ‘whup’ to announce their presence, and possibly to share their identities. This matters because the ocean is growing noisy, and it is possible that these contact calls are masked by human sounds. Humpback whales have demonstrated some resilience to ocean noise, but whether discrete sounds like contact calls can be altered to be heard above the noise may be the difference between maintaining relationships and losing them.