By eavesdropping on the calls of blue whales, researchers hope to get a more accurate picture of the massive mammals' distribution and abundance.

通过窃听蓝鲸的呼叫，研究人员希望能够更准确地了解这种大型哺乳动物的分布和数量。

撰稿/播音Christopher Intagliata

翻译张心茹

审校：张清越

One of the drawbacks of researching blue whales is that most of the time you can't see what your study subjects are doing, or how many there are—or even, where they are. Satellite tags have revealed some of their diving behavior and where they migrate. But tags will never give a complete picture of the population at large.

研究蓝鲸的一个困难是大多数时候你都看不到你的研究对象在做什么，或者有多少 - 甚至是在哪里。卫星标签显示了他们的一些潜水行为和迁徙地点。但标签永远不会完整呈现种群的全貌。

"Because it's really hard to fit a tag on a whale." Ana Širović, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "We have 121 tags that have been deployed on blue whales. And we're talking about 16 or so years of field work. So it's not realistic to think we can just go out and tag all the animals and figure out that way how many there are."

因为在鲸鱼上安标签真的很难。” Scripps海洋学研究所的海洋学家AnaŠirović说。 “我们已经在蓝鲸身上安装了121个标签，这已是16年左右野外工作的成果，所以认为可以凭借标记所有的蓝鲸，得知他们的数量是不现实的。”

But Širović is using another method to track the underwater giants—eavesdropping on their songs and calls. <> (That's sped up so you can hear it by the way—much of the sound they produce is outside of our hearing range.)