Soundbites is a weekly (biweekly, occasionally) feature of the coolest, newest bioacoustics, soundscape, and acoustic research, in bite-size form. Plus other cool stuff having to do with sound. 

Jackass penguins have quite the vocal repertoire: this is from a little while ago, but still really cool. The link is a great pop-press writeup of this paper recently published in PLOS ONE. Adult birds have vocalizations for four separate situations, and chicks have two different calls. Vocal animals are constantly surprising us with how much they can say…

Soundscapes can be used to monitor biodiversity: but with some caveats, figuring out how to get beyond anthropogenic noise among them. Still, once the hiccups get figured out, this has a lot of potential to rapidly assess biodiversity.

Seahorses produce different sounds based on context:  I totally did not know that seahorses make sounds, let alone that they have distinct sounds for courtship and aggression. Very cool.

Fun link of the week: Radiolab tries to say hello to dolphins. Are you listening to Radiolab yet? You should be.