Peter Tyack

Peter Tyack is a Senior Scientist and Walter A and Hope Noyes Smith Chair in the Biology Department of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He is interested in social behavior and acoustic communication in whales and dolphins, and has conducted research on bottlenose dolphins, sperm whales, humpback whales, gray whales, right whales and beaked whales. He has focused on developing new techniques to monitor vocal and social behavior of marine mammals. These include methods to tag whales, to locate their calls and for video monitoring of behavior. Tyack’s research has focused on how these animals use sound for critical activities. This made him sensitive to the possibility that human-made sounds might pose a risk to marine mammal populations by disrupting critical behaviors. He has been involved in the design, planning and field work for a series of experiments investigating the possible impact on marine mammals of human-made sources of noise. The DTAG developed by Tyack and Johnson allows similar experiments with deep diving whales whose behavioral responses to noise have previously been impossible to study.