Sound Bites Archives - Page 3 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. It’s officially the last Soundbites before the fall term at OSU begins!

Light and noise pollution from urban developments may affect ecosystems: the authors did a literature review on studies done on the impacts of light and noise pollution across Australia, and found some glaring and disconcerting gaps in the research. They highlight several effects from light and noise pollution, including stress, changes in foraging, increased predation risk, and reduced reproductive success. They propose that more careful city planning could mitigate the impacts.

Cuttlefish change visual signals in presence of high noise levels: I’m a sucker for cephalopods, and this study is great. Cuttlefish aren’t acoustic animals; in fact, they use complex visual signals to communicate. However, in the presence of anthropogenic noise playback, they changed their color more often than in the absence of noise. This suggests that anthropogenic noise can affect behavior across modalities, and can have an impact on non-acoustic species. Very cool.

Fun link of the week: it’s the first day of school for OSU students on Monday! And granted, as graduate students, that doesn’t really mean much for most of us in ORCAA, since the work doesn’t stop with the end of term. But trust NPR to deliver when I type “sounds of back to school” into Google.

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.

Frequency and amplitude can be used to identify individual wild wolves: these researchers developed a code that was able to identify captive Eastern wolves by their howls. Naturally, they wanted to see if it was possible to do a similar identification on wild wolves, and lo and behold, it worked! They used both frequency and amplitude to identify wolves; the use of amplitude is especially interesting. This has really great implications for use of acoustic monitoring in wolf surveys.

Social mole rats have more complex vocal repertoire than solitary mole rats: did you know mole rats had vocal repertoires? I didn’t. There are social species and solitary species, and here the idea is that sociality necessitates a more complex vocal repertoire than solitary life. Interesting implications for communication across lots of social species.

Signs of stress found in vocalizations of translocated elephants: an elephant herd got translocated, and their vocalizations showed that they were a little stressed out by that. They got higher-pitched, which is an indicator of stress.

Fun link of the week: The Times gets a bout of nostalgia and fills its newsroom with the sounds of typewriters. Maybe it’ll make their reporters more productive…or just infinitely more annoyed.

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. Can you believe it’s September already? I can’t! This is a frog-heavy post because a lot of interesting frog stuff has been coming out lately; my apologies to marine mammal fans.

Multimodality as a frog coping mechanism for traffic noise: what’s multimodality, you ask? Multimodality refers to communicating in more than one sensory mode; in this case, using both vocalizations and visual cues to communicate with potential mates. While these authors found that switching sensory modalities wasn’t the case for European tree frogs, they do say that this may happen in other species (like the tungara frog I mentioned in my post about the Frog Communication Symposium).

Traffic noise causes stress in frogs: this is VERY cool. Traffic noise playback causes physiological signs of stress in the form of increased corticosteroids in female wood frogs, who use the chorus of male frogs to orient toward the breeding pond. Not only is there stress, but they tend to freeze up and not move, which may impede breeding migration. This may be because the stress hormone is causing an immobility response, or because they can’t figure out where the chorus is due to masking.

Fun link of the week: you know how usually I post a pop press article or a video here? Well this week, it’s a third paper. It’s a paper on coffee roasting acoustics. Apparently it might be helpful for coffee roasters to listen to their beans cracking. I don’t drink coffee, but many of the ORCAA do (Holger especially!), so this seems like a great way of combining two of the lab’s loves!

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

It was a slow news week, folks, so I went back in time a bit to get you some interesting tidbits.

Tree crickets not affected by anthropogenic noise: in a field where we’re constantly searching for an effect, sometimes it’s nice to read a paper that says the opposite. The authors speculate that because tree crickets evolved to call in environments with lots of other calling insects, they might not have issues with high anthropogenic noise levels.

White-throated sparrows alter songs differentially depending on noise source: depending on what noise is going on in the background (cars, spring peepers, wind, or other birds), white-throated sparrows would change their songs to compensate in the way that would allow them to be best heard. Sometimes this was singing at higher frequencies, sometimes it was not singing at all. It just goes to show that you can’t look for a single, across-the-board response to noise.

Visitors will pay for quiet national parks: humans value soundscapes, too, and we’ll put our money where our mouths (or our ears?) are.

Fun link of the week: kind of a rough cut on this, but it’s from the source so I’ll stick with it. David Rothenberg is a musician and a philosopher who does live duets with animals. Here he’s playing with some humpback whales in Hawaii. I first heard about this guy on Radiolab and he’s super cool. So is Radiolab.

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

Baby sea turtles make noise: and I bet it’s adorable. This is the first recorded instance of vocalization in this species, and the calls take the form of complex contact calls.

Bat-eared foxes prefer mute prey: they’re bat-eared for a reason (better hearing), but their most common prey is comparatively quiet, despite the presence of lots of noisy prey around. This could be because the quiet prey is preferred by the fox, or because the noisy prey has stronger anti-predator defenses, or, most likely, both.

Crabs don’t have ears, but they can hear predators: despite not actually having ears, crabs will still detect and react to sounds of preying fish by changing their feeding behavior. (This is a late addition to this week, which is solely Danielle’s fault for not realizing the amazing link Michelle had sent.)

Fun link of the week: here’s a TEDtalk about a guy who was born colorblind, but has a device implanted that allows him to “hear” color. Tip of the inspiration hat to the great blog Soundscape Explorations.

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

Anthropogenic noise has an impact on spider behavior: invertebrates are often overlooked in the anthropogenic noise discussion, but it turns out that intermediate levels of noise can impact prey-detection behavior detrimentally in the garden spider.

Cardinals detect differences in vocalizations adjusted for noise: we do a lot of work on how animals adjust their calls based on anthropogenic noise, but not always on the response of conspecifics to those adjusted calls. Here, cardinals give stronger territorial responses to non-adjusted calls, but lose the ability to distinguish as the environment gets noisier.

A couple of weeks ago, the 2nd International Conference on Environmental Interactions of Marine Renewable Energy Technologies happened in Scotland, and it turns out a few of their talks had to do with marine mammals and noise. Here’s one of them.

Tracking porpoises with underwater arrays is possible: researchers set out see if they can track porpoises by listening to their clicks with an array of hydrophones, and it turns out it worked really well! This has great management implications for figuring out behavior in certain settings.

Fun link of the week: what does the fox actually say? Hank Green and SciShow give us the scoop.

Animal Bioacoustics

Technology. Ecology. Noise

Category Archives: Sound Bites

Soundbites for the week of Sept. 22-26

Soundbites for the week of Sept. 15 – 19

Soundbites for the week of Sept. 1-5

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