Sound Bites Archives - Page 2 of 3

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.

Fish sound preference may inform migration patterns: here’s an interesting one. Water sounds are thought to be important in triggering upriver migration patterns, so these researchers played some tones and watched how fish reacted. They avoided the 100 Hz tone and were attracted to the 200 Hz tone. Then they fed this into a GIS model and think that they can replicate patterns now–they might even be able to manipulate migration behavior.

Boat presence as important as noise in disrupting foraging patterns in dolphins: these researchers used passive acoustic monitoring to listen to dolphin buzzes during foraging, and found that it was correlated more with boat presence than just noise level.

Fun link of the week: a scientific examination of whether or not a duck’s quack actually does echo (I love scientists because we do this sort of thing in our spare time).

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. We’re back in the new year (after a holiday break) with all your favorite acoustics news!

Bowheads show increasing song diversity in Beaufort-Chukchi seas: in perhaps one of the more hopeful papers to appear in Soundbites, these researchers report 12 separate bowhead song types found in this area, the most to date. What’s more, they attribute the greater variety to population growth!

Noise may affect signal evolution in grasshoppers: I’m loving all these papers coming out about female preference in the face of noise. Here, females of a species of grasshopper showed a change in shape of their preference function when presented with male calls in noise (as opposed to quiet). Since this signal has a sexual selection component, the noise features of a landscape may in part drive signal modification.

Fun link of the week: I give you five minutes of the cutest frog in the world. Listen to its little peeps. It sounds so grumpy. (Seriously, this will cheer you up. It’s great).

Female katydids who don’t vocalize are more at risk of predation than vocalizing males: it’s been assumed for a long time that signaling to attract a mate also attracts predators (it’s certainly true in frogs). This study questions that. The authors found that flying female katydids were caught by bat predators far more often than still vocalizing males.

Shipping noise causes stress and therefore impacts immune response in lobsters: another tale for the “animals we don’t think are affected by anthropogenic noise but actually are” file. Lobsters showed decreased immune response when they were exposed to high levels of shipping noise, which has implications for the fishing industry and the health of lobster stocks.

Fun link of the week: those who have been following this blog for a little while know that I’m a big fan of Lord of the Rings and of movie sound design. Well, today marks the release of the last Hobbit Film, The Battle of the Five Armies. In honor of that, the video in this link’s week walks you through the sound design of the films.

Okay, so, the holiday season is upon us, and I thought I would do something a little different (mostly because end-of-term has meant I am fed up with reading papers and would rather look at holiday stuff). Today I present to you: a holiday gift guide for your favorite bioacoustician.

Species of interest cookie cutters: who doesn’t love holiday cookies? Better yet, let’s make holiday cookies in the shapes of bioacoustically relevant species! You’ve got your suite of marine mammals: seals, dolphins, and whales. Let’s throw in a bat for good measure. And of course, we can’t forget about my frogs! And let’s put a penguin in there for Michelle.

Really nice noise-canceling headphones: because we listen to a lot of stuff.

Xtratuf boots: land or sea, it doesn’t matter–a good pair of waterproof boots are necessary for any field season, anywhere.

Acoustics-themed art: how about a print of a waveform of something important to your bioacoustician of choice (like frog calls)? No? Well, you can always get a spectrogram poster instead.

But really, I think all the grad students in ORCAA can all relate to the following comic:

(“Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Jam, www.phdcomics.com)

Happy holidays!

Humans and hermit thrushes show convergent “song cultures”: this is a cool one, and a little complicated. Apparently people have long debated the human preference for simple integer harmonics in our music–these are what generate our scales, both Western and non-Western. It turns out that hermit thrushes also prefer simple integer harmonics, and it’s actively selected for. While this isn’t prevalent among all birdsong, it’s interesting to see that there’s a sort of convergent evolution of this “song culture”!

Birds are impacted by road noise on their autumnal migration routes: a lot of work has been done on birds in springtime (since that’s when mating tends to happen), but these researchers found that birds also prefer quieter areas on their autumnal migration route too. Unless they’re insectivores, in which case they didn’t care.

Fun link of the week is courtesy of Holger again, who is finding the best stuff on the interwebs. Did you know that the European Space Agency just landed a spacecraft on a comet?!? SO COOL! Here’s another thing I didn’t know: comets sing!! Follow the link and you can hear a comet singing!

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. Welcome to November, everyone! Fall is definitely here! I promise I’ll have a proper ASA post up soon, but in the meantime here are your Soundbites for the week!

Cruise ships may be having an impact in developing tourist markets: the good thing about ecotourism is that you’re not openly depleting resources the way you used to be. The bad thing about ecotourism is that increased exposure can degrade the environment. Places like the Eastern Mediterranean and the Adriatic are facing increased noise levels because of increasing tourism.

Microclimate affects frog calls: abiotic noise like streams and waterfalls can have as much of an impact on vocalizing animals as anthropogenic noise. Here the researchers wanted to know if frogs in different microclimates (near stream, far from stream) were changing their call frequency to overcome stream noise, and they were!

Fun link of the week this week comes from Holger and Radiolab–the story of a vest that helps deaf people hear.

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. I’ve been doing really well on this weekly thing, but I might break my streak next week as I’ll be in Indianapolis for ASA(!). That just means you’ll get a real blog post from me next week!

Aposematism led to increased vocal diversity in poison frogs: tip o’ the finder hat to my Garcia labmate Lindsey for this one, and it’s brilliant. You know those little brightly colored poisonous frogs? These authors wanted to know if aposematism (displaying bright colors like that as a warning to predators) might lead to increased vocal diversity, since they’d have to worry less about predation. And it did! In conjunction with sexual selection, aposematism allowed the evolution of a broader vocal repertoire!

Silvereyes shift their frequency down in urban noise–and it works: These are silvereyes. Silvereye birds They’re really cute. You can find them in Australia and New Zealand (which is where I took this photo). Most animals shift their frequencies up above urban noise, but it turns out silvereyes shift theirs down. This increased the predicted effective space of their alarm call 20%!

Fun link of the week: Robert Krulwich of Radiolab wonders about singing bats!

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.

High-frequency vessel noise may have an effect on marine mammals in shallow water: much of the anthropogenic noise that we’re concerned with at ORCAA, whether it’s road or vessel noise, is low-frequency because of the attenuation of higher frequencies. However, in shallow water, the high frequencies may not attenuate as much and may therefore cause masking for higher-pitched odontocetes.

Direct-developing frogs are more reliant on climate cues to start calling: what a week, we get one whale link and one frog link! There are some species of entirely terrestrial frogs that don’t go through a tadpole stage; instead, they hatch as mini adults. However, the eggs still need to be kept moist while they’re developing. These researchers found that the onset of calling was more closely tied to high humidity and rainfall than it was to overall air temperature, which is a different cue than most species of tadpole-metamorphosing frogs.

Fun link of the week: I’ve been practicing for my presentation at ASA in a couple of weeks, so I’ve been asking myself this question regularly: “does my voice really sound like that?” Here Greg Foot examines why our voices sound different on recordings.

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.

Proximity to wind turbines reduces brood parasitism: this is fascinating. These researchers looked at nest success in relation to proximity to wind turbines, and only found a difference for one species, the blue gnat-catcher. It turns out that nests closer to wind turbines had less of a chance of being parasitized by brown cowbirds. This presents an interesting dichotomy between managing for wind turbines and managing brood parasitism.

Invertebrates may also be impacted by anthropogenic noise: we at ORCAA work entirely on vertebrates, but these authors make an excellent point that invertebrate species have the ability to hear anthropogenic noise. As they are a huge part of food webs in all ecosystems, neglecting to study their response to noise is neglecting a huge part of the systems we study.

Fun link of the week: the loudest sound in recorded human history was heard 3000 miles away. 3000 miles. That is one loud volcano.

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. Well, Soundbiters (your new collective noun), term has officially started and the ORCAA students are off and running.

Automated frog call detection–it WORKS! Oh man guys, this is so cool. These researchers developed an automated system for frog identification by call, and it worked even on species they didn’t train the detector on! Talk about huge implications for more efficient monitoring in remote areas!

Cichlids aren’t impacted by boat noise playback: we talk a lot at ORCAA about the negative impacts of anthropogenic noise, so occasionally it’s refreshing to see a species that isn’t impacted in our ever noisier world. Development of this species of cichlid fish was not impacted by playback of boat noise.

Fun link of the week: to be totally honest this has very little to do with sound except that an explosion is involved (just a small explosion, I promise). It’s the first day of October and that means PUMPKINS!! You can make a self-carving pumpkin with calcium carbide and hydrogen peroxide! I would totally try this this Halloween except I’m spending the week prior in Indianapolis for ASA.

Animal Bioacoustics

Technology. Ecology. Noise

Category Archives: Sound Bites

Soundbites for the week of January 12 – 16

Soundbites for the week of January 5 – 9

Soundbites for the week of December 15 – 19

Soundbites for the week of Dec 1 – 5 (aka the Holiday Gift Guide for Bioacousticians)

Soundbites for the week of Nov 10 – 14

Soundbites for the week of Nov 3 – 7

Soundbites for the week of Oct. 20 – 24

Soundbites for the week of Oct. 13 – 17

Soundbites for the week of Oct. 6 – 10

Soundbites for the week of Sept. 29 – Oct. 3

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