"Heidi Ahonen is a bioacoustician recording whale calls, whistles and songs to understand if the marine mammals are crossing paths with krill fishing vessels in one of the most extreme environments on Earth."
"GERLACHE STRAIT, Antarctica—The steel gray sea mirrored the overcast sky as Heidi Ahonen buckled her life jacket over her red waterproof coat. In just a few minutes she would jet out on a small inflatable zodiac boat in search of an underwater recording device she hoped to retrieve from more than 1,000 feet below the water’s surface.
She had waited nearly a year for this moment. Thankfully the weather was cooperating, she thought. Too much wind or wave action in the strait could have jeopardized her mission on this mid-January morning.
Still, she said, “I’m nervous,” as she prepared to board the zodiac from the tender pit of the MS Roald Amundsen, an 11-deck hybrid-powered cruise ship named after the Norwegian explorer who became the first person to cross Antarctica and reach the South Pole.
“What if the recorder flooded, or its batteries died?” said Ahonen, a research scientist from Finland who specializes in bioacoustics, a scientific field that examines animal behavior by the sounds they make. It had been 10 months since the device was released into the Gerlache Strait, a 120-mile-long waterway in the Southern Ocean—also known as the Antarctic Ocean—that separates a group of islands known as the Palmer Archipelago from the northwest coast of the Antarctic Peninsula."
Teresa Tomassoni reports for Inside Climate News April 20, 2025.
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