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Re:A New species of whale has been discovered off the wester... by jolmg on Saturday December 12, 2020 @12:32PM (#25399917)
> The experts claim to easily be able to confirm, based on morphology and acoustics, that the whales are a new species

That's pretty cool. I would have thought that confirming you've seen something that no-one else on the planet has would be a somewhat difficult task. I wonder if there's like a world-recognized central database where this morphology and acoustics data of all species are organized for easy comparison.

> These samples were taken as eDNA - a new, fancy technique in which gallons of the surrounding water is captured and filtered for bits of DNA which can then be cross-checked against the DNA of known species.

Also pretty cool. I didn't expect them to leave so many pieces of themselves in their wake for something like this to be possible.

Re:A New species of whale has been discovered off the wester... by Zenst on Saturday December 12, 2020 @12:49PM (#25400040)
Been a lot of headway in the past decade in Passive Audio Monitoring, which is opening up a whole new view of the environments, like the sea. The whole aspect of cheaper tech to make such a set-up is also opening this realm up more to civilian use.

https://www.pamguard.org/ https://www.wwf.org.uk/project/conservationtechnology/acoust...

Re:A New species of whale has been discovered off the wester... by readicculus on Saturday December 12, 2020 @02:02PM (#25400562)
That and ai, manually combing through 50tb of audio data was previously not possible. Have a colleague who just finished up a project detecting these sorts of signals using CNNs, forget what species he was looking at, but results were quite good.
Re:A New species of whale has been discovered off the wester... by Isamu on Saturday December 12, 2020 @12:51PM (#25400049)
According to Wikipedia there are only 89 species of cetaceans, including dolphins and porpoises, so it is a short list to compare with.
Re:A New species of whale has been discovered off the wester... by dragonwriter on Saturday December 12, 2020 @12:56PM (#25400080)
> I would have thought that confirming you've seen something that no-one else on the planet has would be a somewhat difficult task

It would be. But confirming that what you've seen doesn't fit anything that has been described and categorized as a species, rather than that no one has ever seen it before, is a lot easier.