CETI achieved major milestones over the past year. We adopted new research technology (new glider technology capable of listening to whales in partnership with Alseamar) and have shared new research on a diverse set of topic related to decoding whale communication (such as bioinspired suction-cups for whale tags, follow-anything capability for drones and detecting sperm whale echolocation clicks in noisy environments). We had our first CETI Marine Conservation Fellowship cohort graduate, documenting historic moments/datasets such as a sperm whale birth in Dominica. Now, 2024 is off to an exciting start!
We’ve continued our mission in Dominica, conducting field testing to test improvements to our minimally-invasive tags and customized drones that are vital to our research. We’ve also set up and our local field team has completed training on our new CETI glider to begin conducting research. The CETI glider gathers data by swimming alongside the whales.
In January, we also welcomed National Geographic’s Exploration Technology Lab to Dominica. The team worked with the current cohort of CETI Fellows to train them on dropcam technology, an autonomous deep-ocean camera system. These cameras can go down to depths of over 6,000 meters to capture regions of our oceans that humans physically can not. They also joined the CETI Fellows at a local primary school to talk about ocean conservation and the work of both the National Geographic Society and Project CETI.
As 2024 continues, Project CETI is excited to make further progress toward our goals of listening and understanding whales. We have many projects in development such as our third annual Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species Conference III in June which brings together experts from various disciplines related to machine learning, artificial intelligence, and animal communication. Here are the talks from last June. There are also new upcoming papers/studies, partnerships and more in the works! We’ll share more updates soon and in the meantime, please see our latest publications here and latest media coverage here.
We want to thank each of you for joining us on this journey. Your support in our mission keeps us going!