Mission Blue – Peter Tyack

Onstage on the Mission Blue voyage, Peter Tyack took the audience on a journey of the underwater world of sound, and explained the amazing ways whales use sound and song to communicate across hundreds of miles of ocean. Peter Tyack is a senior scientist in biology at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution conducting research on acoustic communication and social behavior in marine mammals.

He has studied the the social behavior and acoustic communication in bottlenose dolphins, sperm whales, humpback whales, gray whales, and right whales learning how these animals use sound to perform critical activities, such as mating, and locating food. This made him sensitive to the possibility that these critical behaviors might be disrupted by human-made sounds in the ocean, like sonar, oil rigs, motorboats, shipping traffic.