Fisheries and Oceans Canada

Technology Transfer Award

For the successful development, transfer and commercialization of AURAL (Autonomous Underwater Recorder for Acoustic Listening) to capture underwater sounds over long intervals

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Team Members

Yves Samson, and Yvan Simard
Fisheries and Oceans Canada

A Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) project to collect sounds in the ocean for its own research needs is garnering worldwide commercial accolades for a host of applications that range from recording whale songs to tracking the movement of ships. The DFO scientific team from the Maurice Lamontagne Institute in Quebec led a multidisciplinary team of academic and industry specialists that developed technology to capture undersea sounds at depths of up to several hundred meters for periods of more than one year. Known by its acronym AURAL, individual units or networks of instruments can be suspended from vessels and ice covers or attached to environmental buoys or the seabed floor. Installed in the Canadian Arctic since 2005, the technology is of particular significance to the protection of marine mammals and the need to chronicle the effects of global warming. With highly durable components that minimize energy consumption, the versatile system stores natural ocean sounds such as earthquakes and fish and mammal sounds as well as signals from human origins and noise pollution caused by maritime shipping and offshore oil exploration.

AURAL debuted in 2005 and within two years generated more than 10 times the initial investment, with sales in Europe and the United States.