fun Archives - Animal Bioacoustics

…that I would grow up to be a pseudo computer nerd doing stuff related to animals. (sarcasm…)

I was recently reminded of the online game Neopets*. Anyone out there remember this game? Mom – do you remember me playing it?

One of my favorite Neopet species – the Bruce. Image from: http://www.neopets.com/allpets.phtml

It was sort of like a computer based Tomogatchi and Pokemon hybrid. You had pets, that were cute and colorful and had names. You had to take care of them, and you could play games with them. You’d collect points (Neocoins) that you could use to buy things for your pet, all that good stuff. You could also have a store in the Marketplace where you could sell extra stuff you had, or buy from others. This is where I should have known I was going to grow up to be a giant dork who finds joy in creating things on computers. I LOVED working on my storefront. I loved teaching myself HTML. Then I could have the coolest fonts (WordArt anyone?), sweet backgrounds, terrible color combinations.

For many of you, this may also remind you of Myspace…another great venue for my web customizing talents. I was pretty late to the Myspace game, but when I did, I made sure to try and have the MOST personal and customized page.

So what does any of this have to do with marine bioacoustics? Um…nothing really? I was just having a lot of fun making some animated spectrograms (see here for the HOW TO – thanks MicheW!) and I think that is what got me thinking about all this. Plus Samara said she remembers this too, so I’m not the only one.

Disclaimer

*this is somewhat deceiving. I made it sound like someone else reminded me of Neopets. That’s not true. Ah the pitfalls of passive voice. I (me, Selene) remembered Neopets all on my own. I’m not sure why or how. But then I ended up googling it and it still exists and here we are, and I’m writing this, fighting the urge to make an account again.

Last week I got to spend a week offshore, participating in the last field season (what?!) of the SOCAL-BRS project. This was a bittersweet week, to say the least. I’ve been involved with this project since before I even started grad school (see here and here for my blogs on it the last two years). It’s a long-term project (2010-2017) so I’m not sure I ever realized I wouldn’t be spending a week or two every summer, offshore of Southern California doing awesome whale tagging and behavioral response research. But, here I am, back at home, and that’s it! We still have a year of analysis left (already counting down to the analysis meeting in December!) so more science is still to come. But this week was a great time to reminisce and reflect how things have changed for myself and others on the project.

My friend and colleague Caroline, and I, trying to catch us dinner after getting blown off the water in the afternoon.

First off, there are at least 5 BRS babies. Never saw that coming! Everyone is a bit more sun damaged (despite our best efforts) and a bit more grey. I went from being a nervous, naive, some-what-lost-soul trying to find my way in the acoustics world to a full blown bioacoustician (is it ok to call myself that?). Although this research is not directly related to my PhD….it is in a system I work in regularly, with collaborators I love working with, can learn so much from, and want to keep working with, so it’s a week well spent.

That SOCAL Magic

While I had an amazing few weeks of field work for my own PhD research earlier this summer, this past week provided something a little different. It served as a reminder of the wonder, the inherent magic, that comes from working with animals out on the water.

I saw more marine wildlife in one week then I have ever seen in my life. I saw no less than 12 species (blue, fin, humpback, sperm and killer whales, common (x2 species), bottlenose, and Risso’s dolphins, California sea lions, elephant seals, and harbor seals) of marine mammals. And I not only got a glimpse of them, but got to enjoy them. From watching blue whales up close from the RHIBs, to seeing common dolphins sprint away from killer whales, to hearing bottlenose dolphins whistling while bow riding. Each day reminded me why I LOVE what I do. (Oh, and maybe I was simply less stressed because my entire dissertation didn’t depend on if I could get the stupid QUEphone to work the way I wanted it to…)

Sperm whale flukes + spunky bottlenose dolphins + tagging boat. Photo taken under NMFS Permit # 14534, J. Calambokidis. — Sperm whale flukes + spunky bottlenose dolphins + tagging boat. Photo taken under NMFS Permit #19116, J. Calambokidis.

Don’t get me wrong, I love sitting in the lab. Discovering new calls, answering questions through detailed analyses, and playing with shiny new yellow AUVs. But I also just love being outside, and enjoying that offshore world. No cell service, seeing Risso’s buzzes come through in real time on the towed array, catching my limit of rockfish in the evenings, hearing the elephant seals calling on the Channel Islands.

I guess the simple point of this blog is to share that contentment, and again that wonder, that I enjoy while thinking back on the last week. Till the next adventure….

Soundbites is your weekly dose of the newest, coolest bioacoustics news, plus other fun stuff, all in bite-size form. A day late and a dollar short this week, folks. Blame my thesis…

Guys, I haven’t got a lot of new bioacoustics news for you this week. I got a great Google alert about a paper called “Not so sexy sounds”, but then my computer thought the link was corrupted and I couldn’t get it for you.

Noise impacts nestling begging in tree swallows: anthropogenic noise has different impacts depending on the species, which is why it’s important to keep studying its effects. Here, tree swallow nestlings increased amplitude and frequency in their begging calls when exposed to white noise; also, when exposed to feeding calls at noisy nests, parents responded with less feeding than at control nests. So noise changed the behavior of both parents and nestlings, and while they were able to compensate and no one was left hungry, it’s not clear if there’s a threshold above which this wouldn’t work anymore.

Fun link of the week: here’s a weird one for you. I was thinking about the acoustics and soundscapes of fall and somehow I ended up googling “pumpkin instrument”. There is an entire musical group devoted to making instruments out of vegetables. They are called, appropriately, the Vegetable Orchestra. Here is a video of them recording one of their albums:

Wow! Summer winded down quickly. It felt like a lot of time spent writing, some exciting and stressful glider piloting, and I wrapped it up with 2 weeks on the water in Southern California working on the SOCAL BRS project. (You can read a public summary of the project here).

IMG_20150817_065223118 — Pretty morning at Santa Catalina Island

I’ve talked about this project before, and this was my 4th summer on the R/V Truth. This leg ended up a bit frustrating in the fact that the animals were more difficult to find and work with than past years. We didn’t observe the distribution of whales we typically do, and we suspect this has something to do with the abnormally warm waters off Southern California this summer.

For example we barely saw any Risso’s dolphins, where typically there are tons around Santa Catalina Island. And the blue and fin whales typically found feeding right in the LA shipping channel weren’t where we expected them. Instead we found them quite a bit further offshore near Santa Barbara Island. AND we saw schools on schools on schools of yellowfin!! (I think……I may edit this in a day or two…anyway I’d never seen so many leaping fish!) EDIT: Yellowfin tun and maybe some small bonitos and maybe some bluefin.

Always Learning

For me the trip was still a great learning experience. I got to use some new tools and learn some new skills, including running the sound propagation software we use in setting up a CEE (Controlled Exposure Experiment), running the sound source that projects the sound playback, and deploying and recording from sonobuoys, little one-time use floating recorders designed to listen for subs, but also work for whales.

IMG_20150820_125325385 — Mapping how sound likely propagates through the Southern California Bight in August.

IMG_20150820_184524193 — My acoustic set up. Sonobuoy detector, sonobuoy recorder, and directions of course.

fd815a259bd582c6c984efad21e9519b — People started to refer to me as Jonesy. I embraced it whole-heartedly.

What’s that, you say? Has Soundbites returned? Indeed it has! After a long hiatus for the summer, Soundbites is returning this term to provide you with all the latest and greatest bioacoustics news, bite-sized!

Phantom road experiment reveals noise degrades habitat: man do I like this experiment. As all of the ORCAA students could tell you, sometimes it’s hard to differentiate the effects of noise from general habitat degradation. These researchers set up a “phantom road” made of speakers and found evidence of avoidance and decreased body condition in birds.

Gorillas change vocalizations based on audience effects, not environmental factors: I don’t get to write about gorilla vocalizations very often! These researchers wanted to test the acoustic adaptation hypothesis to see if both mountain and lowland gorillas changed their vocalizations to maximize transmission in their cluttered (physically and acoustically) environment. Instead, the gorillas changed their vocalization based on social cues, like nearest neighbors and visual separation.

Traffic noise impacts zebra finch embryos and nestlings: the authors set out to distinguish the impacts of noise from other habitat variables by using captive zebra finches. High-noise groups had higher embryo mortality and slower nestling growth, and noise also was found to possibly exacerbate stressed animals further and contribute to reduced parental care.

Fun link of the week: acoustic scientists recently shattered the world record for longest echo. In Scotland, there are long tunnels that used to be used for oil storage. A gun shot echoed for a ridiculous 112 seconds!

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

Multimodal signalling in redwing blackbirds in noisy situations: more bird stuff this week to start off. Redwing blackbirds attract mates both acoustically (with songs) and visually (by showing off their fancy red shoulders). The visual signal was thought to be a sort of backup for the acoustic signal. In noisy conditions, these authors found that birds will change their calls but not their visual signaling, implying that the two signals are separate.

To be loud or not to be loud, that is the question: Females of many acoustic species tend to prefer their males loud because being loud requires energy. Or so we thought! Here the authors found that singing loudly in zebra finches is constrained more by social context than it is by energy expenditure. You should click on this link if only for the diagram of the zebra finch inside a respirometry mask. It’s adorable.

Fun link of the week: you guys know I love the science side of YouTube, right? I’ve made no secret of that. So for this week’s fun link, I give you a video from Joe Hanson of It’s Okay To Be Smart about the loudest sound:

(also, look! I finally figured out how to embed videos!)

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)

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.

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!)

Animal Bioacoustics

Technology. Ecology. Noise

Tag Archives: fun

I should have known

Disclaimer

Remembering Why

That SOCAL Magic

Soundbites for the week of Oct. 5 – 9

Call me Jonesy

Always Learning

Soundbites for the week of Sept 28 – Oct 2

Soundbites for the week of May 11 – 15

Soundbites for the week of April 27 – May 1

Soundbites for the week of April 13 – 17

A mighty voice

Soundbites for the week of March 30 – April 3

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