The Mysterious Bio-Duck Sound Identified at Last

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In our 2013 field season we managed to apply two suction cup digital acoustic tags to Antarctic minke whales.  The recordings made by these tags helped to solve a decades-old mystery of the source of the ‘bio-duck’ sound which has been commonly heard in the Antarctic but never before attributed to an animal.  Thanks to analysis of the acoustic records from our tags – case solved – the sounds are produced by minke whales.  You can read the paper in Biology Letters here and read some of the news coverage here on the BBC and here on the NOAA web site.