Whitlow W. L. Au (July 31, 1940 – February 12, 2020) was a leading expert in bioacoustics specializing in biosonar of odontocetes (dolphins, porpoises, and toothed whales).
He was graduate advisor to MacArthur Fellow Kelly Benoit-Bird, who credits Au for discovering how sophisticated dolphin sonar is, developing dolphin-inspired machine sonars to separate different species of fish with the goal of protecting sensitive species, and for making numerous contributions to the description of Humpback whale song, which helped protect these whales from ship noise and ship traffic.
It can't be said for certain how much Whit's fascination for understanding the dolphin's echolocation, or his love of the Islands, influenced his decision, but he decided to join the biosonar research group at the Hawaii Laboratory of the Naval Undersea Center.
He, along with physicist Bob Floyd and biologists Earl Murchison and Ralph Penner ["Measurement of echolocation signals of the Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus Montague, in open waters," J. Acoust.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America from 1974 to the present day contains dozens of articles with Au's name in the authorship line, a remarkably productive development of the fundamental knowledge of dolphin and whale biosonar.
(Nature 366, 376 (1993)) while Bertel Møhl wrote that "This book is an authoritative, precise and comprehensive treatise in 277 pages of what is known about sonar (or echolocation) in dolphins, written by the leading scientist in the field" [Aquatic Mammals 19 (3), 125-126 (1993)].
Au did not hesitate; he immediately took the opportunity to become a faculty member and continue echolocation and hearing research with dolphins and small whales in Hawaii.
His work with the Acoustical Society of America has been extensive: In 1993–94, he made Animal Bioacoustics a separate technical committee within the ASA, and in 1994 he and Mardi Hastings were appointed its first co-chair.