Soundbites is a weekly (biweekly, mostly) feature of the coolest, newest bioacoustics, soundscape, and acoustic research, in bite-size form. Plus other cool stuff having to do with sound.
Acoustic “sonic net” may deter invasive European starling communication: noise isn’t all bad. Sometimes it allows us to get rid of things we don’t want, like invasive species. Here researchers used a “sonic net” comprising of frequencies overlapping with starling communication frequencies over a feeding patch. Birds under the net didn’t respond to alarm calls, which is promising in using acoustics as a deterrent for this species.
Singing higher doesn’t guarantee success for urban birds: blame the surplus of bird literature on springtime, I guess. In the bioacoustics world we often talk about the seminal “Birds sing at a higher pitch in traffic noise” paper; here, the author of that paper addresses how that affects survivorship. Turns out there’s no correlation between success in an urban environment and singing at a higher pitch.
Fun link of the week: in the grand tradition of fun links of the week having nothing to do with sound, this one goes out to Selene, who defends on Friday. Good luck, Selene! You’re going to do awesome! (and clearly, bring a sword.)
Saturday April 11th was Marine Science Day at Hatfield. Selene and I headed to Newport to help host the PMEL Acoustics information table, but I also had a chance to explore the event and see what other labs had on display.
In the Marine Mammal Institute room, I visited fellow Fisheries and Wildlife graduate students. Below, Amanda, Erin, and Florence explain their research projects and share audio, video, and photographs from the field.
Across the hall, I learned about sea star wasting syndrome and practiced my identification skills.
Some sea stars hanging out in the aquarium.
In the genetics lab, I extracted DNA from a strawberry! In this photo, I am adding ethanol to separate the DNA material from the water in the vial.
In the Oregon Department of Fisheries and Wildlife outside tent I learned about shellfishing regulations. Sustaining the Dungeness crab fishery requires that recreational fisherman only take males crabs that are larger than 5 3/4″ across. The second photo shows an example of two crabs – can you tell which one is legal and which is not?
The one on the right is too small!In the second outside tent, a life raft and survival suits were available to try-on.
Inside the library, Marine Resource Management students Sara and Sandra showed me their “Ocean Management Game”. I had pretty bad luck and sadly had remove a lot of fish and sea stars from the ocean.
Finally, at the PMEL Acoustics table, Joe, Selene, and I showed an example of our hydrophones and explained how we use a 3D printer to create custom assembly components. We also had a microphone set-up with a real-time Ismael display. When visitors spoke, whistled, or sang into the microphone they were able to “see” their voices in the spectogram.
Joe setting up the 3D printer for an anxious audience.About to start printing a tiny robot figurine!Selene and I with the acoustics lab display.
(What marine mammals have to do with gas exploration and how can you help?)
Biking is cool for so many reasons.
Besides all the personal benefits, mainly related to health advantages and financial savings, there is also an immense ecological value to it. Since bikes run on fat (of the person that rides them) instead of oil, it has zero emissions of CO2 to the atmosphere, hence reduces one’s carbon footprint to the planet. In addition, it directly diminishes the road kills and helps save the animals. Interestingly, the choice of being on two wheels than four it does not only protect the four-legged friends of ours but also the no-legged, big brained, wet and mysterious marine friends of ours: the whales! Feel free to find this slightly overstretched but bear with me and I will unfold this connection for you.
Biking works without consuming fossil fuels and for this reason it can affect procedures and the market of oil and gas operations. In contrast to what some people believe, our everyday choices and behaviors can actually change/save the world.
You are more influential than you think
If you care, you can actively contribute to fossil fuel consumption and affect the correspondent impacts. Besides the joy of biking, this is the focus of this post: you save money on fuel and save the earth from having its intestines removed.
Oil makes the world go round
It has been estimated that about 130 billion tons of crude oil have been extracted from the ground since commercial drilling began (1870). According to the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, there are still 1.3 trillion barrels (1 barrel~160 liters) of oil reserve left in the world’s major fields (Saudi Arabia, Iraq, The United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iran) which at present rates of consumption should last about 40 years. Humanity has managed to use in just about 150 years a resource that took probably up to millions of years to form! About half of this amount has been consumed in the last 25 years.
Wait a minute, how old are you. Hmmm, did you do it?
Needless to say that the oil deposits are not distributed homogeneously around the world. Also remember that are not consumed equally by everyone either. The world’s 2/3 of the remaining oil deposits are, as you correctly guessed, in the Middle East. The United States has only 4% of the world reserves but consumes over 25% of the oil consumed worldwide and ends up importing more than half of its supplies.
At this point exactly, I am being antsy for political comments and discussion, but since this is not the appropriate platform, I will limit myself to let you think about the sacrifices that a person (usually without realizing) or a government (always consciously but trying to mask it) are willing to make to get access to the oily wells.
#1 (and the only one discussed here) sacrifice: the ecosystem
The carbon emissions by burning petroleum is contributing to the greenhouse effect that affects our climate that in turn has gone bonkers. Intense and extreme weather conditions seem to occur and new historic records of high or low temperatures are being broken almost every year in many parts of the world, including Alaska and the East Coast of United States correspondingly.
Our greed for black gold has taken the geoscientists and the oil companies to the oceans. In the USA, Alaska has been the target for oil exploration, where a vicious circle is taking place. Since the industrialization and the burning potato of climate change occurred, the ice is melting with higher rates, the glaciers’ volume decreases, and land or part of the ocean that before were inaccessible are now exposed. What an opportunity has risen! We can now drill for more oil to burn, emit more CO2 and enhance the rapid ice melting.
Do we want to ride this carousel?
In addition to the oil industry horror that took place in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico before, the most current USA oil hunt has now taken oil companies to the Atlantic. I will explain more about this in a bit.
It is clear that the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska (1989) and the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico (2010) were accidents during the extraction and the transportation of the oil. The impacts were obvious to everyone with dramatic images of black seas, tarred beaches, sea birds covered in thick oil, and dead baby dolphins stranded on the coasts that blackened everyone’s heart.
Before even the pumping of oil from the Earth’s guts begins, other risks for the environment are underlying that are not obvious to everyone and are hard to identify.
The oil is buried deep below the ground and the ocean floor. How do you find something so well hidden? The geoscientists’ secret weapon is called airgun and it is exactly what its name says: a gun that shoots air.
Are the guns of air innocent as they sound?
The seismic airguns used for oil and gas exploration are NOT the same as the ones that we add soap and water and make bubbles filled with air, wouldn’t that be nice? Instead, they blast compressed air, waves of energy, in to the ocean floor to use the echo and take an image of what it is beneath it. Each layer within the Earth reflects a portion of the wave’s energy back and allows the rest to refract through. These reflected energy waves are recorded and their differences in arriving time can tell us about the different materials in the ground where the sound has different speed. The general principle is based on the technique of echolocation that bats, dolphins and sperm whales use. They send waves of sound that bounce off objects, go back to their ears and give an acoustic picture that can be as high definition and detailed as an x-ray.
For the seismic exploration as is called, hydrophones are used as the ears that listen and record the echo of the sound. Similar hydrophones to what I use to listen and record the voices of the whales.
Boats tow large arrays of airguns that shoot energy waves strong enough to penetrate the sea bottom and travel miles into it. These airguns can be so loud that resemble dynamite explosions, are repeated about every 10 seconds for whole days and often periods of months.
How to take underground “photographs”
Now imagine yourself living in a town that is bombed all day every day for months.
A deaf whale is a dead whale
The oceans are “worlds of sound” and marine mammals count on sound and their acoustic as well as vocal abilities to communicate with each other, find mates, locate food and navigate. Can you imagine the impact of these explosions to their lives?
Depending on their proximity to the operating airguns, whales can be physically harmed, deafened, or can alter their behavior, leave the area and move miles away to avoid the noise or temporarily lose their ability to hear. This intense noise can mask acoustic signals that come from other animals and hence interfere with adult breeding calls, or degrade anti-predator responses. Mothers and calves use sound to communicate underwater hence such loud noise can increase the risk of calves being separated from their mothers with lethal effects. The sounds from the airguns are loud enough to disrupt activities of blue and other endangered marine mammal species essential to foraging and reproduction over vast ocean areas. Over time, airgun noise can cause chronic behavioral and physiological stress, just like intense noise pollution can cause to people, that can suppress reproduction and increase mortality and morbidity. Not good.
Make a change
Currently, there has been a reaction to the USA federal government for having released a map with the areas where oil companies want to look (hear) for oil. Regulations for surveying in the Atlantic were finalized last summer, while this January a proposed plan for offshore drilling was released. It is a humongous area on the East coast and includes the habitat for a variety of marine mammals, including the 500 remaining critically endangered Northern Right Whales. Thanks Obama!
Even if seismic can mask the voices of whales they cannot shut down our voices.
Do you want to help?
You can be part of the social media campaign designed at getting out the facts about seismic exploration and urge the Obama administration to reverse the decision to allow seismic surveys for oil and gas in the Atlantic.
For more info you can read here the letter to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management expressing concern over the introduction of seismic oil and gas exploration along the U.S. mid-Atlantic and south Atlantic coasts (sent on 3/5/2015.) and here the letter to President Obama urging him to wait on new science before permitting the use of seismic airguns in the Atlantic Ocean (sent on 2/20/2014.)
Here is what you could do to be part of this:
Print out the sign and fill in your name and affiliation/position.
Take a picture of yourself holding the sign. It reads:
“Seismic airgun exploration for oil and gas puts marine life at risk of serious harm.”
It is not just USA being thirsty for oil though. I am recently working on the Environmental Baseline Study for two locations in the Ionian Sea in Greece that got approved for oil exploration and drilling. Ionian Sea is a significant habitat for eight marine mammal species with critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable species among them. The sperm whale, monk seal, common dolphins, bottlenose dolphins and beaked whales are intensively using this area and are particularly sensitive to noise. My responsibility at this point is to make sure that the current presence of these species is carefully recorded before the exploration and operations start so that potential impacts can be evaluated after that.
The same time I have been working on the Strategic Environmental Impact Assessment for the construction of offshore wind farm in 11 locations in Greece. Alternative and renewable energy resources are certainly the direction we should globally be looking towards. However, it is interesting to know that potential negative impacts can also occur to marine organisms during their construction and operation. For this reason, the mitigation measures are of great importance and I expect them to be taken into account.
One more reason that we love biking is that it is quite as a squirrel. Imagine how much more peaceful this world would be with more bikes and less cars. This paradise exists in the micro-cosmos of OSU campus. We are lucky people the Corvallis people. If it can happen here, it can happen everywhere.
Soundbites is a weekly (biweekly, mostly) feature of the coolest, newest bioacoustics, soundscape, and acoustic research, in bite-size form. Plus other cool stuff having to do with sound.
Bioacoustics helps find what may be a new beaked whale species: this one was hard to miss this week, as it was all over the pop press news as well. Here’s the original article. Passive acoustic monitoring in the Antarctic found echolocation and communication signals that were beaked-whale-esque, but unlike species seen before this. It might be a new species!
Cicadas and birds partition acoustic space in the tropics: I think the acoustic niche hypothesis is really neat, and it’s cool to see it in practice. Bird species and cicadas in the tropics vocalize at similar frequencies, so birds avoided calling when cicadas were calling. If they did call during cicada song, birds changed their frequency to avoid overlap.
Fun link of the week: Michelle had an awesome post last week about paleo-bioacoustics (what a field name!), so continuing in that theme, let’s talk about terror birds. Have you guys seen a terror bird skull before? Terrifying. This new research suggests that they had low voices and were better at perceiving low-frequency sounds. This means we’re one step closer to my dream, knowing what dinosaurs actually sounded like…
I came across an interesting video clip today unpacking the anatomy of sound production in Neanderthals. Generally we think of Neanderthals as having low-pitched ‘grunt’ like voices (at least this is how the media/film portrays them); as it turns out this may be a misrepresentation of the Neanderthal voice. Watch the short clip below to hear more specifically what I mean:
It is an interesting stereotype that mighty animals have deeper voices (think about lions, elephants, even humans), and this description of a clearly mighty species (Neanderthals were pretty amazing, so well adapted to their freezing environment!) doesn’t fit the trend. I won’t unpack stereotypes in this blog post (though I welcome you to read more about them on my friend and labmate Niki’s post); I do however encourage you to listen to the voices around you, including your own, and let your mind take in the range of sounds, expressions, and informational nuances that our human voice can produce.
Today’s blog serves two purposes: (1) inform readers what’s going on in my research world and (2) an educational piece sharing some of my trials and tribulations with ArcGIS this week.
Right now we are preparing to deploy a glider up in the Gulf of Alaska, near Homer, in the US Navy’s Gulf of Alaska Temporary Maritime Activities Area. The glider’s acoustic system samples at 194 kHz allowing us to listen for vocalizations up to 97 kHz, which covers almost all cetacean species in the area, except porpoises which vocalize at really high frequencies (>150 kHz, we recorded them with a different glider though!).
I won’t be actually going out to deploy it or piloting this glider – we are collaborating with some folks from the University of Washington – but I am responsible for putting together the glider’s track and coming up with track points that are 5 km apart so we can set our ideal path for the glider. Why am I responsible for this, you ask? Well because I took an introductory GIS (Geographic Information System) course so….this becomes my job.
For those of you that have worked with GIS, you understand there is a STEEP learning curve. It may be one of the least intuitive programs on the planet. But, it is incredibly powerful for not only making maps but for spatial analyses too, so I am super happy to have learned even a tiny bit about it and get to learn more every week.
Well I’ve made these maps before for Guam and Hawaii, so Gulf of Alaska, easy peasy! I’m finally starting to remember how to make the track from the initial way points, then turning the track into 5 km spaced points. But, news flash! The earth is round. And measuring things at higher latitudes gets weird/complicated/annoying/inaccurate/etc.
So this week (really the last two days) I taught myself about projections in ArcGIS. Projections are basically trying to show our round, 3D Earth in 2D. At the equator this isn’t so bad, but up (and down) by the poles things can become really distorted.
Take this image of the US for example. Depending on what projection you use, it looks slightly different! And those differences are more pronounced the further north you get. So by the time you get to Alaska…well, you’ve got to do something about it.
Fortunately, lots of people have made hundreds of projections for different areas and different spatial scales that reduce distortion, either in area, distance, angles, etc.
So then all I had to do was find the one I needed (this took much research and trial and error), then redo all my mapping/measuring/GPS coordinate extracting steps on a correctly projected map. You know, once you make sure all parts of your map are in the same projection, that the data frame has the right projection, and that you saved it every 5 seconds in case it crashed. Once I got past the frustration, I ended up pretty proud of myself, and now I learned my lesson for next time: only work in areas near the equator.
Want to know what projection I used? Of course you do. The lovely Alaska Albers Equal Area Conic! Sorry I can’t share a picture of the pretty map…I’m not sure I should show you where our glider will be I don’t want anyone going up to Alaska and stealing it.
Soundbites is a weekly (less often when Danielle is doing fieldwork) feature of the coolest, newest bioacoustics, soundscape, and acoustic research, in bite-size form. Plus other cool stuff having to do with sound. No April Foolin’ here, just cool research (because Danielle hates April Fools. Seriously.).
Grasshoppers have trouble localizing mates in noisy conditions: another tale in the continuing story of how noise screws up mating for lots of different taxa. Grasshoppers can locate mates by sound very well in quiet conditions, but it takes more time and energy to do it in noisy conditions.
Using passive acoustic monitoring to document sperm whale predation on fishing grounds works: I saw this as a talk at last year’s Acoustical Society of America meeting, and it was just as cool then. Collaboration with fishermen is allowing researchers to document sperm whale depredation, all using passive acoustic monitoring. This also allows them to easily test new deterrent methods.
Fun link of the week: you guys. Look at this weird-sounding bird I found for you. This bird is so weird. I heard it described as the red-alert sound from Star Trek and I agree. (also, look, I finally figured out how to embed YouTube videos!)
