Scientists are using earthquake sensors to track the movements of fin whales in order to understand the mammals better.

Fin whales are the second largest living creatures on Earth but very little is known about them. Due to their large bodies and swift movements, scientists have not been able to study them much but have found that they are among the most endangered species on Earth, currently.

Last month, a dead fin whale washed up on the shore near Burien in Washington State. It was discovered that the fast moving creature collided with a huge ship, resulting in its death. Therefore, scientists believe that if they could find a way to study the whale's migration pattern, it could help big vessels avoid hitting and fatally injuring these giant whales.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America has already published three papers over the winter about the ongoing study, which is being conducted by researchers from the University of Washington.

A Seafloor seismometer, which records vibration and is used to detect earthquakes is now being used to trace the movement of this endangered species. The cry of a whale is similar to the rumbling of an earthquake. Initially it was difficult to distinguish the whale cry from an earthquake vibration.

"Over the winter months we recorded a lot of earthquakes, but we also had an awful lot of fin-whale calls," said principal investigator William Wilcock, a UW professor of oceanography. At first the fin whale calls, which at 17 to 35 vibrations per second overlap with the seismic data, "were kind of just a nuisance," he said.

UW doctoral student Dax Soule worked with Wilcock on a series of discarded data collected through the years from eight seismometers spread around ocean floors. The duo was able to determine the routes that the fin whales usually travelled by calculating the call patterns in relation to the locations of the different seismometers.

Michelle Weirathmueller, a doctoral student used these findings to determine the volume of the fin whale's call, she found that the call had a consistency of 190 decibels.

"We'd like to know where the fin whales are at any given time and how their presence might be linked to food availability, ocean conditions and seafloor geology," she said. "This is an incredibly rich dataset that can start to pull together the information we need to link the fin whales with their deep-ocean environments."