Biologists Look for Underwater Bombs and Find… New Whales!

Thanks to underwater nuclear bomb detectors, the distinctive song of a brand new population of pygmy blue whales was picked up in the Indian Ocean, near the Chagos Archipelago, an encouraging discovery for marine biologists who study the secretive cetaceans.

“We are still discovering missing populations of the largest animal that has ever lived,” says senior author Tracey Rogers, a marine ecologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia. “Finding a new population of pygmy blue whales in the Southern Hemisphere is exciting. It increases the global population that we did not realize was there before.”

The 24-meter long pygmy blue whale – or Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda – is a subspecies of the blue whale that went unnoticed for decades. That is until researchers analyzed the acoustic data the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) collected with its sophisticated hydroacoustic arrays. Used to detect illegal nuclear bomb tests in the oceans, thus keeping the world safe, CTBTO data also serves marine science in unprecedented ways.