Some moments define an era: the Moon landing, 9/11. For the natural world, a new milestone has surfaced from the ocean’s past, the oldest known recording of a humpback whale. Listen to the historic recoding played over a modern video of whales, above.

Scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), one of the world’s leading marine research centers, have uncovered a recording captured on March 7, 1949, near Bermuda.

The sound was preserved on a fragile but remarkably intact audograph disc found in the institute’s archives. At the time, researchers aboard the research vessel Atlantis were testing sonar systems, measuring explosive charges, and conducting acoustic experiments in collaboration with the US Office of Naval Research.

Underwater recording technology was then in its infancy, and scientists still struggled to identify the sources of many ocean sounds.

Around that same period, WHOI scientist William Schevill and his wife Barbara Lawrence — a pioneering mammalogist — were laying the foundations of marine mammal bioacoustics. In 1949 they used a crude hydrophone and dictating machine to record beluga whales from a small boat in Canada’s Saguenay River, the first confirmed recording of wild marine mammals. Many recordings from the late 1940s were poorly preserved or lost, reflecting how early ocean acoustics research struggled with both technology and storage.

“Data from this time period simply don’t exist in most cases,” said Laela Sayigh, a marine bioacoustician and senior research specialist at WHOI. “The ocean is much louder now, with increases in both the number and types of sound sources. This recording can provide insight into how humpback whale sounds have changed over time, and serve as a baseline for measuring how human activity shapes the ocean soundscape.”

Today, WHOI scientists deploy passive acoustic buoys, Slocum gliders, and autonomous hydrophones to monitor ocean soundscapes at scale. These systems generate vast datasets used to study marine life, track ship noise and industrial impacts, and understand long-term environmental change.

The WHOI-led Robots4Whales program focuses specifically on protecting marine mammals using autonomous ocean robots equipped with the Digital Acoustic Monitoring Instrument (DMON). These systems detect whale calls in real time by tracking frequency changes in sound — producing “pitch tracks” from spectrograms that can be matched to known species libraries and transmitted ashore via satellite.

“Underwater sound recordings are a powerful tool for understanding and protecting vulnerable whale populations,” said marine bioacoustician Peter Tyack, emeritus research scholar at WHOI. “By listening to the ocean, we can detect whales where they cannot easily be seen. At the same time, these acoustic tools let us track how human activity — from shipping to industrial noise — alters the ocean soundscape and affects how whales communicate, navigate, and survive.”

Unlike most recordings from this era, which were lost as early media deteriorated, the audograph discs survived and appear to have been uniquely used for underwater sound — making them a rare, possibly singular example of early ocean listening preserved from the dawn of marine acoustics.

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Many discoveries relevant to conservation of threatened species are emerging from commercial fish markets in Yemen, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia.

Informal networking is significantly improving the biological knowledge bank, with fisherman often reaching out to academics when unusual creatures appear in their nets. Rima Jabado, a PhD student at United Arab Emirates University, was contacted by a fisherman who caught an unfamiliar shark, resulting in the first scientific record of a sand tiger shark in UAE waters.

It’s not unusual to find legally protected species such as whale sharks for sale in markets. Shark fishing is prohibited by law in Saudi Arabia, yet large numbers of sharks are sold openly at local markets.

How the shark came back to life

Jabado told Scientific American, “There is clear need for better enforcement of current legislation.”

Fish market surveys are increasingly being used to supplement traditional field sampling as they capitalize on industry resources that can magnify the breadth and scope of a research team’s study.

Julia Spaet, a researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, says that “the resources dedicated by a fleet of fishermen will always outmatch any scientific efforts to assess abundances. The fishing industry is more efficient at finding sharks where there are not many left.”

The surveys are tricky. Researchers have to identify, count, measure and document the “species of interest” before fishermen move the catch to market.  They often buy the fish outright to step around time constraints (of getting freshly caught fish to vendors) and uncooperative fishermen.

Let’s go back to that resurrected shark.  In 1902, naturalist Wilhelm Hein discovered the fish in Yemen and brought a specimen back to Austria.  It sat unnoticed in the Vienna Museum for decades; so we can assume the facility was relatively cat-free.  In 1985, well past its sell-by date, naturalists identified it as the first (and only known) specimen of Carcharhinus Leiodon, or smooth-tooth black-tip shark.

“Some suspected it might be extinct or not a valid species,” said Alec Moore, from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Shark Specialist Group’s Indian Ocean group, since scientists had never found others.

During a 2008 Shark Conservation Society research expedition, Moore spotted among the many species of whaler shark in a Kuwait fish market one that looked similar, but different, to other species. Turned out to be another smooth-tooth black-tip, caught more than 3,000 kilometers from where Hein’s fish was found; the first of its kind seen by scientists in over a century.

In 2013, Marine & Freshwater Research reported that recent studies in fish markets throughout the region have located 47 additional smooth-tooth black-tip sharks, greatly increasing what scientists know about this species. Better understanding of how large the sharks grow, number of offspring, and data on habitat enables development of an effective species conservation and management plan.

Moore offers this tip to land-based shark hunters, “Always go to the fish market with a camera, especially in tropical countries where there is little data—there is always the chance that you could find something new.”

Image of Julie Spaet and shark from Julie Spaet and KAUST

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