Animal Bioacoustics

When I first started grad school in OSU’s College of Oceanography I learned a few important things. The first, is what the acronym “PhD” actually stands for (see title). The second was a trick for finding out if you were ‘really‘ doing oceanography, if it’s too heavy to lift, too expensive to lose, and you drop it to the bottom of the ocean anyway, then you are in fact doing oceanography. I’m not sure if I’m happy to report or not, but after three and a half years of grad school (I know, even I’m surprised I’ve been here that long) I can finally understand what I was taught on that fitful first day of class.

To say that I’ve been busy is true, but isn’t very interesting. Busy is relative. So instead I’ll highlight a few of my major accomplishments from over the past month, and the friends and colleagues who helped me get there — because as I’ve said many times before, science is collaborative.

Accomplishment #1: Build anchors

Luna Tunes inspects an errant chain link and wonders why we didn't use this as an anchor. — Luna Tunes inspects an errant chain link and wonders why we didn’t use this as an anchor.

Team: Myself, John Flynn (my husband), David Culp (my intern), special guest appearances from Florence van Tulder of the Marine Mammal Institute and Vista and Luna Tunes (my dogs).

My dissertation research hinges on the successful deployment of four Autonomous Underwater Hydrophones (AUH) which are mounted on aluminum landers and sunk to the bottom of the ocean in Glacier Bay National Park. These hydrophones are recovered six months later with the use of an acoustic release system (see my earlier blog posts from Antarctica for details on the acoustic release). This system only works if the hydrophones don’t drift away. There is no handbook for studying acoustic ecology (there is no really handbook for getting a PhD either… it’s more of a choose your own adventure book). While this system has been deployed in all the worlds oceans, each deployment is unique.

Concrete, Aluminum, and lead. Whale research at its finest.

Which means we had to design a mooring system, including the anchors. Sparing you the nitty gritty details of why I couldn’t just buy anchors (4 landers x 4 feet on each lander = 16 feet needing anchors = $$$$$) what ended up happening was a little lesson in density (100 pounds of concrete on land = ~ 60 pounds of concrete in water), a few hilarious interactions with the great folks over at Englund Marine & Industrial Supply (“Hi, I’d like to buy 600 pounds of lead cannonballs. Oh, that’s all of the cannonballs? Ok, yeah. I’ll take them. And all of your 5-gallon buckets too.”), a few very long days of pouring concrete (where my intern David proved to be the most valuable intern on the face of the planet, and not just because his truck could hold 2500 pounds of concrete, and I realized I totally married the right guy), and voila we now have twenty lead/concrete anchors weighing 100-130 pounds each to keep our equipment snugly on the sea floor. Phew.

Accomplishment #2: Host Conference

Florence van Tulder and I after moving 600 pounds of lead weights from the back of my Mazda hatchback to safety at the Hatfield Marine Science Center.

Team: Myself, Shea Steingass (MMI), Courtney Hann (MMI), Selene Fregosi (ORCAA), Niki Diogou (ORCAA), with guest appearances by David Culp (my intern… again), and Kat Nikolich (former intern and Western Washington Grad Student)

So, I am one of two student representatives to the Northwest Student Chapter for the Society for Marine Mammalogy (NWSSMM). I attended my first chapter meeting in 2012 and have been an active member in the chapter ever since. This year we offered to host our annual chapter meeting, for the first time, at Oregon State University. I spearheaded the conference along with Shea (mistress of swag) with the logistical support of ORCAA and the grad students of MMI. Kat and David jumped in to help with shopping and set up (phew). I’m also proud to report that this year’s conference was sponsored! The Hatfield Marine Science Center, the Marine Mammal Institute, and OSU’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife all generously funded this year’s conference. As a result we were able to offer free registration to all of our undergraduate students, and to provide mugs to each of our conference attendees (with a super cool logo, designed by Shea). We had record high attendance with 70 conference goers, not including our panel of experts, and our generous graders (Holger was one of our generous graders- thanks Holger!).

The feedback we got from our panelists (Drs. Leigh Torres of MMI, Markus Horning of MMI, Ari Friedlaender of MMI, and ORCAA’s own Sharon Nieukirk) was that the caliber of the presentations was impressive, the day ran smoothly (we had coffee breaks!), and that the students were engaged. The feedback we got from our students was that the panel was insightful, the presence of a wide range of professionals at the conference was exciting, and that the keynote talk by Dr. Ari Friedlaender was “tha bomb”.

The inclusion of a panel was new this year, and reflects the wide range of marine mammal professionals that we have in the OSU community. We talked a lot about the pros and cons of technology and the role of the human observer as well as the pros and cons of a PhD, and balancing life and work. I know that for those of you in the field of marine mammal science that this doesn’t seem like a breakthrough, but these fundamental topics are essential to both the progress of our field, and our humanity. When asked what he looked for in a graduate student Dr. Markus Horning astutely brought up animal welfare, and seeking students who had a vested interest in the safety and health of the animals we study. Dr. Ari Friedlaender pointed out that a drive to understand the science is as important (or perhaps more important) than the drive to love the species. Sharon and Leigh both spoke up about the role of quantitative skills (modeling, programming), as well as what it means to travel abroad, and to spend time in the field observing. Perhaps most poignantly was the conversation about what we sacrifice to study marine mammals, and the loss of women between the post-doc and faculty stages. These conversations continued long into the night after the conference, and were rehashed this past Monday when Holger took the lab out to dinner (thanks again Holger!).

I think that is largely the point of these conferences, to learn about the science, to network and meet new colleagues or revisit old ones, and to inspire conversations about topics that may not always make it into the room (like when we’re too busy pouring concrete to think about whether or not having a baby as a PhD student is realistic). In any case, the conference was a great success (from which I needed some serious recovery). Here’s a photo to prove how happy everyone was.

Accomplishment #3: Ship Hydrophones to Alaska (as well as the rest of the gear)

Team: Myself, Matt Fowler (NOAA), David Culp (you really should know this name by now), Holger Klinck, Sharon Nieukirk.

This post is getting long (you’re still reading! I’m shocked, I would have checked out a few paragraphs ago… but then again I’m ‘busy’). While this section has actually taken up the bulk of my time, describing exactly what it was I’ve been doing is difficult. The answer is fitting shackles, splicing line, shopping at Costco (thanks Sharon!), assembling and programing hydrophones (thanks Matt!), zip-tying, drilling holes in metal, taping things, buying heavy things, lifting heavy things, talking about heavy things (thanks David! for all of the ‘heavy things’), and then finally shipping heavy things (although they were nicely packaged onto pallets in meaningful ways).

David and I deliriously tired and borderline giddy to see this container ship out.

I had a student ask me a few weeks ago what studying whales was like: industrial, I said. This is the little glorified part of field biology. The ability to assemble moorings, and work through the logistics (3/8″ line vs. 5/16″, where do I buy nylon insulator bushings?), problem solve on your feet (we can’t afford that much heavy chain, what else is heavy and made of lead?), paired with the ability to handle problems calmly when they arise (the manufacturer sent the wrong pair of release housings and now the instruments don’t fit. Hmm…what to do). I haven’t seen a whale in months; meanwhile the nice guy at Englund Marine went surfing with porpoise while watching gray whales this week. To study animals that live in the ocean in a meaningful way means developing a method to observe them, without changing them. This can be hard, labor intensive, and logistically complicated. It’s also satisfying, practical, valuable, and at times ridiculous. So I’ll tell you this, when the foam inserts that I needed to ship my acoustic releases were accidentally thrown away by the custodians Matt Fowler gave me the grand tour of dump sites at HMSC, and when we got to a large dumpster with my boxes in it? I didn’t hesitate.

Miche standing inside the dumpster. Whale research at its finest.

In the end, we got the container loaded with gear (anchors, landers, hydrophones, food, shackles, lines, buckets, tarps, and one hula hoop). Matt and I sighed a collective sigh of relief before we closed the door and gave that metal box a pat. Working with Matt was a pleasure, and as he pointed out now that the hydrophones are built and shipped, our job together is done. This caught me off guard a little; building the hydrophones is just the beginning. Next stop, Glacier Bay.

Matt and I say goodbye to the Acoustic Spyglass field gear

***Follow my monthly blog posts here, or check out my personal blog mfournet.wordpress.com for a comprehensive look at my research world***

So…it was my week to blog. I’m a day late. That’s because I was sort of busy yesterday. Defending my master’s thesis (this stuff). I passed!!

So I’ll leave you with this photo of me attempting to relax after a somewhat nerve-wrecking day. Now on to publishing the results!

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.

Traffic noise masks communication in freshwater stream fish: I’m just going to leave this one here. Traffic noise can impact entire watersheds. Anyone interested in making quieter cars yet???

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.)

(image courtesy of xkcd)

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?

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.

Change — 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.

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.”

Send the photo to: npyne@oceana.org

Should be something like this:

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.

Your turn Athens.

superman picture add cape? — Be your own hero

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.

An amazing instrument.

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!)

A couple weeks ago I volunteered to be Danielle’s field assistant for the evening. All of the acoustics fieldwork I have helped with in the past has been on a boat, so I was happy to put aside my dead-week studying to learn a little bit about acoustics research on land. It also didn’t hurt that Danielle is well versed in field assistant bribery (Burgerville! Cookies!)

We headed out of town just after five pm, driving north past Albany to the Ankeny Wildlife Refuge. Danielle has a number of pond sites she visits on a rotating basis, Ankeny contains one.

We arrived at the pond in daylight and got right to work counting egg masses in the first study area. Since the egg masses are tricky to spot, it’s easier to work during the day. Together we walked in straight lines across the (shallow) pond for half an hour counting all of the egg masses we could see. Since the egg masses are so tiny, Danielle and I both had to hunch over to see into the pond, sometimes using our hands to confirm a sighting.

I hope someone buys Danielle a massage after her field season is over.

After we finished our survey effort, we shared some snacks and hung out until nighttime when the frogs started chorusing. When it was fully dark, we put on our waders and headed to a second pond to try and catch some adult frogs. I wasn’t very good at it (the frogs are so tiny and speedy) but Danelle caught a bunch and I helped her weigh and measure them. Finally it was time to record the chorusing!

Earlier in the day I asked Danielle if recording the frogs was a peaceful experience, similar to how I feel when I hear a whale on my hydrophone recordings. She hesitantly told me that sometimes it is…but often the frogs are are too loud for any sort of relaxation. It’s hard to believe that such a loud noise can come out of an animal that is hardly bigger than a quarter, but she was not kidding…

Next time in sharing our research…Danielle goes to sea!

Animal Bioacoustics

Technology. Ecology. Noise

PhD: Piled High and Deeper

Jack of all trades, master of one

Soundbites for the week of April 27 – May 1

HMSC Marine Science Day

Biking for whales

Soundbites for the week of April 13 – 17

A mighty voice

Note to Selene: The Earth is Round

Soundbites for the week of March 30 – April 3

Herpetology with Danielle

Contact Info