Last Thursday marked our labs first successful DMON (Digital Acoustic Monitor) deployment of the spring! The DMON is a passive acoustic instrument that is capable of recording and processing audio in real-time. Friday, May 16th, a single DMON was deployed off the coast of central Oregon to target the acoustic signatures and monitor the occurrence of several high frequency odontocetes (specifically porpoise and dolphin), for frequencies up to 150Khz. Although abundant in the coastal environment of the central Oregon coast, because of their skittish nature, little is known on the behavior of harbor porpoise. Passive acoustic monitoring is an ideal method for collecting information on their presence and vocalization behavior with little habitat disturbance. In light of the planned development for wave energy converter (WEC) testing at the south energy test site (SETS) as part of the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center’s (NMREC) grid connected full scale facility off South Beach, OR, this project is focused on gathering baseline data on high frequency odontocetes using the area. With this information we plan to assess the impact of WEC testing activities as the SETS facility is brought on line.
Pretty Cool Stuff! Fortunately, I will be deploying and analyzing data all summer alongside with Joe Haxel, who is a Research Associate for the Cooperative Institute for Marine Resources Studies at Oregon State University and the NOAA /Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory Acoustics Program.
While a full-depth analysis of last week’s data hasn’t yet been accomplished, I was able to take a quick peek and MAN IT LOOKS GOOD! Both harbor porpoise and killer whale vocalizations were identified – sound bites and spectrograms will be coming soon!
Finally, All of this wouldn’t be accomplished without our friendly Newport neighbors, Marine Discovery Tours, who offer narrated ocean and bay cruises with naturalist guides and have the finest accommodations for viewing whales and other sea life.
Memory storage capacity on the high frequency DMON mooring is limited by the high sample rate (~480 Khz) and we therefore record on a 10% duty cycle which simply means “deploy, leave for 7 days, recover, charge, and redeploy” schedule.
Without the help of Marine Discovery Tours, we would not be able to deploy and recover so frequently! So if you plan on taking a trip or a visit to the Oregon Coast, you might want check out what trips are available to see our beloved Oregon marine life, and you never know, if you’re lucky you might just book the trip with all the DMON action and see it first hand!
I’ll be back with a full update on what the ORCAA lab has discovered from our DMONS in August! In the meantime, make sure you follow ORCAALab on Twitter for updates!
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.
I am going to start with a stereotype. The term stereotype is derived from the Greek words στερεός (stereos), meaning “firm, solid” and τύπος (typos), meaning “impression,” hence “solid impression”. The stereotype of Greeks relating the definition of every word to Greek origin. I know, stereotype in the stereotype, right? The Matryoshka Principle (MP) in effect!
Some people like to generalize a lot. Most of us criticize this behavior but overall it is hard to avoid it. Stereotypes result from peoples’ effort to understand the world by categorizing. As long as the stereotypes are not accompanied by prejudicial or discriminatory reactions I can, sarcastically, use them and self-stereotype.
Stereotype that does NOT apply
I enjoy looking into the history, the origin of things, the etymology of words. The word itself derives from the Greek word ἐτυμολογία, etymologia, from ἔτυμον, etymon, meaning “true sense” and the suffix -logia, denoting “the study of”. MP again!
I regularly (quite always) find myself asking people, especially here in the US, where they come from. Where they originally come from, you know, not where they were born but their ancestors origin. In the case that I cannot directly ask people questions, I ask myself.
Where my studies’ subjects come from, where and when cetecean and bioacoustic rese
Roman copy in marble of a Greek bronze bust of Aristotle by Lysippus, c. 330 BCE.
arch was initiated. You would (not) be surprised to discover that Cetology (from κῆτος, kētos, “whale”; and -λογία, -logia), has Greek origin, and I am not just referring to the word. It was 2364 years ago when the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle published the History of Animals. He was only 34 when he wrote these 10 books! I don’t want to make any comparisons here, it would be inaccurate because I am also younger (!!!!), but just for reference: I struggle with just one publication.
Aristotle was the first to study and record dolphins (from Greek δελφίς (delphís), “dolphin”, related to the Greek δελφύς (delphus), “womb” and referred to as “a ‘fish’ with a womb”) and dolphin behavior. He made observations, he took notes and then he scientifically published them. He even reported his methods! Sounds like what everybody does, right? Well yes, but not 2.5 thousand years ago! It is also startling that he came up with 2 common research methods used nowadays in cetology: photo-identification and tagging. He did not have a camera or any tag equipment, but he collaborated with the fishermen and they would create artificial notches on the dorsal fins of the dolphins that were entangled alive in their fishing nets and then they were able to identify different individuals, monitor their movements and get information on their age and span of their lives.
In his writings, he correctly claimed that dolphins were mammals, he observed that they bore their live young and suckled them, breathed air and communicated by underwater sounds:
“The dolphin has a blow and lungs… it sleeps with the snout above the water and when it sleeps, snores. None produces any eggs but they give birth directly to an embryo like in the case of human and the viviparous quadrupeds. The gestation period lasts for 10 months and gives birth in the summer. The dolphins produce milk and they suckle the young which they accompany for long periods. The caring for their young is remarkable. The young grow up fast and becomes adult at the age of 10 years old. It lives for many years, even above 25 or 30… The voice of the dolphin in air is like that of the human in that they can pronounce vowels and combinations of vowels, but have difficulties with the consonants.” (Aristotle, HISTORIA ANIMALIUM, 350 BC)
It is interesting to think how much more information we have (or have not) acquired the last couple thousands of years. Especially as far as acoustics are concerned as it was not before the 1950s when new observations were made. In 1949, William E. Schevill and B. Lawrence used their hydrophones (from Greek ὕδωρ = water and φωνή = sound) into the Saguenay River of Quebec to make the first underwater recordings of the sound of cetaceans, belugas in this case, in the wild.
The use of hydrophones started at wartime too, used during WWII by
Passive Aquatic Listener (PAL): my hydrophone to eavesdrop the sperm whales and the dolphins at the Gulf of Alaska and the Greek Seas.
the submarines to detect underwater targets. Since it became declassified and available, it has been widely used today to study the underwater soundscapes and reveal a non-Silent World. While Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s title was a misnomer, Professor Huxley, in 1869, stated in his essay on the “Physical Basis of Life”:
“The wonderful noonday silence of a tropical forest, is, after all, due only to the dullness of our hearing; and could our ears catch the murmur of these tiny maelstroms, as they whirl in the innumerable myriads of living cells which constitute each tree, we should be stunned, as with the roar of a great city.”
making a point on the information we can get from soundscapes and the essentiality of the right equipment. Thus hydrophones become a favorite tool for cetologists and bioacousticians to record, understand and accurately study the charismatic marine-megafauna.
Being able to hear the whales and dolphins “voices”, opened a discussion whether these intelligent animals can actually talk, use their sounds to communicate with each other in a language context. I’m not sure which is the answer but I don’t see why we should give such an anthropocentric meaning to their vocalizations just to consider them intelligent and worthy of our protection and conservation efforts…
But the languages have further significance even within the human society. Anthropologists, linguists and psychologists have done research around the world and looked into many different languages to understand the importance of the use of certain languages and words in our minds performance. Results of these studies show that the words and language that we use represent and shape what and how we think. Thus who we are! Very cool research has shown that human languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Just like what cetaceans do using sound to navigate and locate food over long distances!
In fact, an interesting example of how words change the way we view the world is this one of Shakespeare who is known to have created a whole bunch of new words and phrases that have unarguably affected the way we sense our surroundings. “It’s all Greek to me” has been introduced by him, but I know that after reading this post this phrase has no use for you! In fact Greek is not really that hard, of medium difficulty. After 44 posts you will be proficient…
I will close by quoting Marcel Proust who said that the real voyage of discovery doesn’t consist in seeking new landscapes but having new eyes. And to paraphrase that, as far as my field of studies is concerned, the voyage of discovery consists in seeking soundscapes instead of landscapes, in listening to the deep sea, deep listening and understanding what we hear of the sounds in the oceans.
Every fourth week of the month I will be sharing with you, thoughts, ideas, everyday lessons and concerns, more related to bioacoustics than the Greek language 😉
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.
Frogs change calling time in response to traffic noise: species with high peak frequency didn’t care about traffic noise, but species with low peak frequency optimized their calling to fall in lulls of traffic noise to avoid masking.
Fun link of the week: NPR looks at the technology and design behind the latest Godzilla’s roar (which in the past was done with a resin-coated leather glove against a double bass). With the emphasis on sounds recorded at higher frequencies, my guess is they got some high-pitched animal sound in there and slowed it down… thoughts?
Are you interested in sound? Want to get involved in acoustics but just don’t know how? Do you enjoy helping scientists do their work without actually being a scientist?
Then consider this your call to arms.
This is me, catching frogs* and encouraging you to science hard.
Ladies and gentlemen, from the mind of the great Bryan Pijanowski, soundscape ecologist extraordinaire, I present to you: Global Soundscapes.
But let’s talk about this whole citizen science thing for a second.
Citizen science has become an amazing tool for data collection across fields. The Zooniverse is probably the best example of this with their suite of astronomy-focused sites, some of which have mobile apps to go along with them (classify galaxies on the go!); multiple papers have been published with the data. There are even trips you can take now where as part of a vacation, you can go collect information with scientists (like if you want to go diving in tropical reefs for conservation).
Soundscape ecology and bioacoustics represent two fields that are ripe with opportunities for citizen scientists. Everyone has a smartphone these days with decent enough headphones, and there is never a shortage of data when it comes to sound; often we can’t get through it all in time to finish a project, or we can’t go through it as thoroughly as we’d like. This is where citizen science comes in. When a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs sit down, complete a quick training, and start their own data collection, they can cover a lot more ground than one trained scientist, and any errors in classification will be smoothed out the more people join in.
There are a few researchers in bioacoustics and soundscape ecology who have taken advantage of this (and I’m sure I’ve missed some). Pijanowski, as mentioned above, is having people on their smartphones make a short recording of the soundscape they’re in, and then answering some simple questions about what types of species they’re hearing, or if they hear wind or rain, and how the soundscape makes them feel. Here in the ORCAA Lab, we’re concerned with mostly biotic sound, but just think how this can be extended: what about that specific sound of sitting outside at a Parisian cafe, listening to the people walking by and the church bells throughout the city? What about the sound of New York City in the summer? These places have significance as cultural soundscapes, and Pijanowski is trying to study those as well.
In addition to this awesome app, you’ve got a project by Zooniverse called Whale.fm, matching killer whale and pilot whale calls with known individuals in a database. A researcher at University of Southampton created an app just for finding cicadas. And moving back to whales, there’s an array of hydrophones in the Salish Sea where people can sit and listen for killer whales.
From the perspective of the researchers, not only is this a great way to farm out some data collection and to make connections with technology outside our field, but it is one of the best ways I can think of to get people interested in sound as a function in an ecosystem. These projects become ambassadors of the field, and give greater exposure to what we’re doing. Protecting soundscapes is only going to become important to people if we talk about it, and show how excited we are about it.
So researchers: think about ways you can integrate this into your projects! And citizen scientists, here is your notice: we need you! Go out and listen!
As your humble frog lady, I’ll be blogging regularly every third Friday. I also tweet for our lab at @ORCAALab, so go follow us for micro-updates!
*Also by catching frogs I really mean catching the one frog that jumped in front of my car, and then finding that I’d been locked in the wildlife refuge I was in. Subsequent field excursions improved dramatically.
I scored for my first blog post…lab trips make for an easy topic.
This past weekend ORCAA (with some of our OSU marine mammal graduate student colleagues) piled into my Explorer and journeyed north to Bellingham, WA for the 18th Annual Meeting of theNorthwest Student Chapter for the Society for Marine Mammalogy(mouthful!) The drive was long, and it rained the whole time, but the setting was wonderful and plenty of scientific fun was had!
ORCAA crew trying to look lessmore serious?
This year’s conference was hosted by the lovely folks of Western Washington University, and included students from University of British Columbia and University of Washington. We did a great job of reppin’ the orange and black, especially considering we traveled the farthest. The ORCAA ladies all gave oral presentations: Niki on sperm whales in the Gulf of Alaska, Michelle on humpback whale communication in Southeast Alaska, and myself on tagging some elephant seals. Shea Steingass of PEARL talked about hypoxia and harbor seals and Courtney Hann of the CEOAS department and Alaska Whale Foundation presented a poster of her citizen science mobile app to get the public involved in doing marine mammal science.
OSU student presenters (L to R): Courtney, Shea, me, Niki, and Michelle
This meeting is an awesome, low-key conference for graduate and undergraduate students from universities all over the Pacific Northwest to present their research, meet and network with new friends, and catch up with familiar faces. It is especially great because the group is almost entirely made up of students which equals a less scary, less stressful environment to practice sharing your science. I was much less nervous than I was last year; I’m happy to report that talking in front of large groups DOES get easier with practice. I couldn’t have been more proud of our lab and fellow OSUers. Everyone did a phenomenal job!!
The impressive Shannon Point Marine Center…Anacortes, WA
Saturday’s presentations were followed by a wildlife viewing excursion on Sunday. We got to visit WWU’s beautiful Shannon Point Marine Center and took a boat tour of the gorgeous San Juan Islands on the comfy and cozy RV Zoea. Highlights included lots of harbor seals and several seabirds I wish I could identify. No killer whales but I blame Shea, she says she’s bad luck…Anyway, it was a great way to get outside and wrap up the weekend.
Wildlife viewing in the San Juan Islands!
Many thanks to WWU for hosting (amazing organization by Kat and Erin) and we are pleased to announce that OSU will be hosting here in Newport in 2015. The wheels are already turning on how we can make next year even better.
Phew…that wraps up my very first blog ever; a little insight into the day-to-day lives of ORCAA students. I welcome any suggestions in the comments, I’ll be here every second Friday 🙂
It’s springtime here on the Oregon Coast. The white-crowned sparrows are singing at the Hatfield Marine Science Center, the seagulls are growing audacious at the sight of beach picnics and barbecues, and on top of our normal research load here at the ORCAA lab (bowhead whales, how I love thee singing on my computer screen), the field season is upon us in full force!
Part of my job over the last year has been to coordinate a marine mammal observation effort here in Oregon’s near coastal ocean. We’ve been very fortunate to partner with a number of labs and projects — including Sarah Henkel’s Bethic Ecology Lab, Jay Peterson’s Zooplankton Ecology Project, and Rob Suryan’s Seabird Oceanography Lab — who’ve invited us to share their sea time and tag along on cruises recording marine mammals. We’ve had some inspiring cruises (bow riding dall’s porpoise, a possible pilot whale sighting!) and a few rocky days (my stomach hasn’t forgiven the Elakha yet), and we’re not through yet. Now that the summer season is around the corner it’s time to recruit additional observers, and get our lead observers (Amanda and Niki) up to snuff on their safety certifications.
If you’ve ever been a part of a marine research cruise, you may be familiar with the rigor of safety training. We take safety very seriously; as marine scientists we have a keen awareness of both the awe and danger associated with the open (or even near coastal) ocean. All of that severity, however, doesn’t stop us from having a little fun. As you can see by today’s photos of Amanda and Niki (a.k.a. Gumby #1 and Gumby #2). I didn’t go through safety training myself today, but that didn’t stop my from doing a little spying.
More to come soon on how projects unfold here at the ORCAA lab.
Michelle
Amanda after a cool dip in the big ocean (ok… maybe it was the harbor)
The lovely ladies of the ORCAA lab (Amanda & Niki)
If Amanda falls overboard, this is what you should look for.
As she was working on a whale watching boat in southeast Alaska, Michelle Fournet became immune to the constant loud, mechanical sounds of the boat’s engines. It became background noise to her, but as she observed whales day after day, she became concerned how the noise was affecting the marine mammals she was traveling to see. More broadly, she found herself becoming interested in human impacts on marine animals’ health and behavior.
Fournet, who recently received an M.S. in Marine Resources Management from Oregon State University, has started working towards a Ph.D. in Fisheries Science, working in Holger Klinck‘s Bioacoustics Lab. His research focuses on the least invasive ways to collect data about noise using technologies created in his lab.
Because Fournet is focusing her research on marine mammals of the Oregon Coast, such as harbor porpoises and beaked whales, gathering behavioral data by observation is very difficult. The ocean area around the coast features 30 foot wave swells at time, and typical Oregon rainy weather and the coast’s short shelf make it difficult to even find the animals, much less observe them. Added to this is the fact that many of the species Fournet is studying rarely come to the surface means that traditional ways of collecting data are inefficient.
Enter bioacoustics – eavesdropping on these large marine mammals. Recording the sounds that they make is a cost effective way of gathering data. Rather than sending out boatfuls of researchers trained to spot behavioral patterns, an underwater microphone, called a hydrophone, can monitor an area where mammals are known to visit. In addition, unlike a boat, (whose noise may further affect the animals) there is almost zero impact to the species that the hydrophone is monitoring.
Fournet is excited to learn more about how certain noises affect certain species on the Oregon coast, especially considering that Newport, Oregon, has been named the future home of the Pacific Marine Energy Center, the first wave energy test site in the United States.
“i need to find out if this is a problem,” explained Founet. “If it is, we may need to change how we build and interact with these species. And bioacoustics is the best way for us to study this.”
