Eavesdropping on Whales: Hydrophones, Noise and Asymmetrical Listening in the Ocean

This article concerns the practice of using hydrophones to listen to sperm whales, a species that emits the loudest biological sounds on the planet, in an era of worsening oceanic noise pollution. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with a whale tourism company in the Norwegian Arctic, the article describes how trained guides track sperm whales with hydrophones that work by amplifying their clicking sounds within a given range. The article specifically engages the influential theories of Umwelt and affordances, arguing that hydrophone use augments human sensory worlds to afford a visceral experience of underwater noise pollution that is usually off-limits. In turn, the article describes how sperm whales have learned to ‘depredate’ off fishing lines in response to acoustic cues from fishing vessels, highlighting the mutability of affordances and the role of adaptation that is often overlooked in anthropological literature on Umwelt.