An artificial intelligence system is quietly eavesdropping on the Salish Sea 24/7, listening for the calls of endangered southern resident orcas and pinging humans when the whales show up. Conservation partners say those alerts are already helping slow ships and pause loud construction so the animals can hunt in relative peace. The open-source platform OrcaHello flags likely orca calls for expert review and, once confirmed, routes detections to ferry operators, ports and whale-response teams. Researchers say those short, quieter windows matter because human noise can mask the whales’ echolocation and make it harder for them to find and catch Chinook salmon.
How the AI pinpoints whales
OrcaHello processes live audio from underwater hydrophones with a machine-learning model that sifts hours of sound into short candidate clips, cutting human review down to just minutes per day, according to AI 4 Orcas. The tool started at a 2019 hackathon and has been running live since September 2020, logging hundreds of confirmed orca detections and generating an open dataset that other scientists can tap. When moderators verify that a clip really is a southern resident, the system can push alerts to subscribers involved in vessel operations and whale response.
Alerts trigger slowdowns and pauses
Those confirmed detections are fed into regional response channels so ship captains and construction crews can change what they are doing in near real time. Quiet Sound, a coalition of ports, tribes, agencies and nonprofits, coordinates seasonal voluntary slowdowns and pauses in pile-driving when whales are present. The Port of Seattle is among the partners that help turn OrcaHello detections into concrete operating decisions for vessels transiting Admiralty Inlet and north Puget Sound, according to the Port of Seattle.
Why sound levels make a difference
For the whales, this is not just about annoyance. It is about catching dinner. A 2024 study in Global Change Biology that used suction-cup tags found that every 1 dB increase in maximum noise around hunting whales was tied to roughly a 12.5% drop in the odds of a successful prey capture, with females especially likely to give up on a chase when sound levels were high. Acoustic surveys of large ship transits in the Salish Sea and Haro Strait have shown that passing vessels can raise received sound levels across the same frequencies orcas use for echolocation, making that masking problem worse, according to PeerJ. And because the decibel scale is logarithmic, a 10 dB increase represents about a tenfold jump in acoustic intensity, so even “modest” noise increases can have outsized ecological impacts, as noted in the Federal Register.
Where this fits in policy
OrcaHello’s alerts now plug into a patchwork of voluntary programs and evolving rules that all aim at the same basic goal: giving southern residents quieter places to feed. Quiet Sound’s slowdowns and related efforts have been tested in recent seasons, while Fisheries and Oceans Canada and other managers have moved toward expanded approach distances and vessel-restricted zones under 2026 measures meant to reduce disturbance, according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Annual population counts and monitoring still show the southern resident community at perilously low numbers, reinforcing calls to pair noise reduction with salmon recovery and pollution cleanup efforts, according to Puget Sound Vital Signs.
How to listen and what’s next
The Orcasound network streams live hydrophone audio to the public, and the OrcaHello team has shared curated recordings along with tools that researchers can use, according to Orcasound. Developers and scientists say adding more sensors and tighter integration with mariners could make targeted slowdowns faster and more precise. At the same time, they stress that acoustic monitoring is just one piece of a larger recovery effort that also hinges on restoring Chinook salmon runs and reducing contaminants, threats that federal officials continue to flag in updates from NOAA Fisheries.
