Sounds like (hah) this is a job for cheap sea drones. Spread them out and have them listen and triangulate the location, and then go there with a human team.
There's at least one company, Saildrone, operating out of Alameda, CA (SF Bay Area and one endpoint of the famed Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9958407>), which might be suited to that. Its 23--65-foot sail-driven, solar-powered drones are tasked with anti-submarine warfare (most likely largely acoustic detection, so well-suited to cetacean observation, which is how whalesong was discovered in the first place), operate autonomously, over wide-ranging areas of ocean, for long periods.
They're mentioned in your link, some additional references:
The cool thing about cheap sea drones is that they are still incredibly expensive to operate. Like, the only cost center they remove is the crew which is negligible compared to fuel, transport, and equipment.
The ones 1970-01-01 mentions are sail-driven and solar-powered. They can operate autonomously over wide-ranging areas for years.
Saildrone have produced at least 24 vessels: 20 in the Gulf of Mexico, four in the Baltic, and possibly others. There's a tender of $37 million with the US Coast Guard, and a market of $412 million as of 2024. This suggests a unit price on the order of about $10,000, which is downright cheap for any seaworthy craft.
It'd be marine animal research as much as most other - I guess the answer is just the same as how much priority one normally ties to that for one's given reasoning.
They're mentioned in your link, some additional references:
<https://www.saildrone.com/>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saildrone_(company)>
Earlier HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16242380> (2018, 5 comments).
I've mentioned the firm a few times: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>