Fiber-Optic Cable Records Bowhead Whale Calls for First Time

Earlier demonstrations centered on the loud, extremely low-frequency calls of blue and fin whales, below 100 hertz, or sound-wave cycles per second. Bowhead whales and North Atlantic right whales call at roughly 150 to 300 hertz and at lower intensity. Their higher-frequency, quieter calls had proved harder for DAS to detect.

The Alaska work tested that gap directly. Utqiaġvik is home to Iñupiat whalers, whose communities have hunted bowhead whales on the North Slope for thousands of years. During spring 2026, Bouffaut worked with the Barrow Whaling Captains Association and the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management.

Their test used an existing fiber-optic cable owned by Quintillion. After Bouffaut and the team analyzed terabytes of data over several weeks, they obtained the first-ever bowhead vocalizations recorded in DAS data. The result establishes detection on one cable, not a completed monitoring system for every baleen species.

What does this change for whale monitoring?

Bouffaut said cable-based sensing could support estimates of whale populations, track when migrations pass, and examine how Arctic whales respond to rapid environmental change. These are potential applications, not outcomes the Alaska trial demonstrated, and population estimates would still require methods beyond simply detecting calls.

Her review of the rapidly developing technology turns those possibilities into a practical argument. Published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, it synthesizes what scientists know about DAS for marine mammal monitoring and recommends steps for moving from proof of concept to an operational tool for whale management and conservation.

“The review is also a call to action for scientists, industry partners and regulators to collaborate,” Bouffaut said. “We now have the technical blueprint to turn global undersea infrastructure into a global network for ocean conservation.”

That blueprint still needs people willing to build it. DAS will not replace traditional underwater microphones, Bouffaut said; scientists can use it to complement them and expand monitoring around the world. The immediate value is additional coverage without placing a new microphone at every location.

The design is dual-use, meaning the same infrastructure can collect several kinds of data. Telecommunications and offshore energy industries already monitor fiber-optic cables for safety and security. The same data streams could also support environmental compliance and wildlife protection.

Bouffaut also argued that the cables’ “immense conservation and operational value” must be demonstrated now. Her review provides the technical case; collaboration and real-world deployment provide the test. If that works, a network already lying beneath the ocean could become a much larger whale-monitoring instrument. If it does not, the first bowhead detections will remain a promising proof of concept rather than a global conservation system.

The review, “Distributed acoustic sensing for marine mammal monitoring,” appeared in Methods in Ecology and Evolution in 2026. Its DOI is 10.1111/2041-210x.70437.