fun Archives - Page 2 of 4 - Animal Bioacoustics

Primate vocal divergence and speciation: a cool study on tamarins in South America documenting how vocal divergence might lead to reproductive isolation in two subspecies, meaning that they might actually end up being different species altogether.

Atlantic spotted dolphins can change the depth of field of their echolocation: these researchers found dynamic changes in the way this species focuses its echolocation, especially as prey gets closer. Neat example of convergent evolution with bats!

Hong Kong’s pink dolphin population shifting to avoid vessel traffic: an already threatened population is getting even more stressed by vessel traffic, and is moving to be less disturbed.

Fun link of the week: this has basically nothing to do with acoustics, except it’s a song on an acoustic guitar. But yesterday was St. Patrick’s Day, so I thought I’d give you a biologist’s take on the holiday.

This blog post has NOTHING to do with bioacoustics. Or noise. Or marine mammals. Or even terrestrial mammals (ok, well technically humans). This blog post is about the awesome-ness that is my stand up desk. A lot of folks have been asking me about it lately so I figured, why not share the joy?

20150123_151000_standingdesk (2) — Crushing work.

I’ve had my stand up desk for about a year now, made from this IKEA hack for about 22 bucks. I am proud to say no less than 5 of my closest friends and colleagues have since also made themselves some version of this (I’m so hipster, its the Oregon way). Many grad students in life science, ecology, marine science, wildlife-y fields pursed such a career path because they love being active, being outside, etc. Look at any of the bio’s of ORCAA students, for example. But what do we actually do most of the time? Sit at our computer.

I have far too much energy to just sit at a computer all day!

So now I’ve got this sweet set up. Not only do I stand at my desk, but I just added a balance pad for EXTRA muscle engagement. I can’t take credit for this, fellow grad student Thaddaeus Buser passed on his balance pad obsession/wisdom to me. And now I pass it to you.

Questions I gotten asked include:

Don’t you get tired all day?

Yes…at first it was really hard! But it gets easier.

What if you want to sit?

Well I don’t have one of those fancy up and down desks or a nice tall chair (that is what dreams are made of), so I take my laptop or some reading material to the library, or a coffee shop, or wherever. It gives me a change of scenery (which I like) plus a little rest.

Is it distracting?

Nope. I actually find it much easier to focus because all my pent up physical energy an outlet now.

I will admit certain work activities are easier sitting (writing) vs standing (Matlabbing), but again, that’s what all the little work spaces around campus are for!

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. Yes, I know it’s been awhile. I’ll try to make this one extra awesome to make up for it.

Dolphins have social food calls: it turns out that humans aren’t the only ones to gossip about our food (see anyone’s Instagram feed ever). These researchers found that wild bottlenose dolphins had particular social calls that were highly correlated with food calls, and didn’t occur otherwise. Dolphins might therefore be sharing information about the food patch itself.

Invasive cane toad calls change the calling patterns of native Australian frogs: as I’m deep in frog fieldwork, you just knew I’d have some frog news for you. Invasive species are bad as it is (and cane toads are particularly bad), but they might also be changing the way native species communicate. Here, one native species decreased their call rate with playback of cane toad calls. I hope these authors extend this work with observational studies, there’s a lot of potential here.

Birds shift the frequency of non-breeding calls above noise: we’ve heard about birds shifting their frequency before, but only with breeding calls. Here, black-capped chickadees (a local species) and American goldfinches both shifted their non-breeding calls (described as “chickadeedeedee” and “po-tay-to-chip”, which I love) above the frequency of urban noise.

Fun link of the week: apropos of absolutely nothing at all, did you guys know that sand dunes sing!??!?! Not only do they sing, they sound creepy! Someone needs to work on some weird ambient music with the stuff, stat!

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.

Classification of non-song repertoire in Southeast Alaskan humpbacks: I am only cheating a LITTLE bit with the fact that this is Michelle’s paper, but it is also very very interesting and applicable! Congrats, Michelle!

Soundscape analysis shows parrot preference for old-growth forest: these researchers used acoustic monitoring to show that seven out of nine species of parrot preferentially perch in old-growth forest instead of regenerating forest. Deforestation has long-term consequences that can’t be corrected by simply regrowing things, guys.

Fun link of the week: Holger has successfully moved to Ithaca, NY only to find himself buried in another Northeastern Snowpocalypse. So this week’s link discusses why it’s so much quieter when it snows. Hey Holger, send the Pacific Northwest some of that–I want to go snowboarding!

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.

Chronic noise impacts anti-predator behavior in house sparrows: a lot of the time, bioacoustics researchers are looking at the impact of noise on communication behavior, but that’s not the only behavior that can be affected. Female house sparrows flushed more easily in chronic noise environments, but this didn’t have an impact on their reproductive success.

Traffic noise affects coloration, not calling, in European treefrogs: some frogs use what’s called multimodal signaling to attract mates, where females are drawn not only by the calling but also by a visual cue, like vocal sac inflation (see my previous post). Here, it turns out that treefrogs don’t seem to be able to change their calling structure, but they are less vibrantly colored in noisy areas. This means it’s likely that noise doesn’t just affect vocal species.

Fun link of the week: this song has been in my head all week, and it’s called WHALE, so I’m pretty sure you should go listen to it.

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).

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. Sorry I missed last week. End of term caught up with me.

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!

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.

Bill morphology shifts along with fundamental frequency in urban birds: we talk a lot in ORCAA about the way animals change their vocalization in response to outside pressure, but there are physiological constraints on the changes that can be made (for example, there’s no way I can sing bass, although I can get to tenor if I warm up). Birds in urban, disturbed areas had longer, narrower bills, which might help them get food at feeders, but actually makes it harder for them to vocalize at the higher frequencies that are more advantageous in noisy areas.

40-million-year-old protowhale was sensitive to low frequency sound: I’m a little bit of a paleo-nerd, so this was pretty cool to see. They looked at CT scans of the inner ear structures of this fossil, Zygorhiza kochii, and compared it to current mysticetes, and found that they were similar, indicating Zygorhiza was probably also sensitive to low-frequency sound the way our current baleen whales are. This implies that the order developed with a sensitivity to low-frequency and toothed whales’ high-frequency sensitivity came later.

Baird’s beaked whales are affected by sonar: beaked whales are some of the most mysterious ocean-dwellers, and we know little about their life history, behavior, or response to noise. Using acoustic tags, these researchers found that a Baird’s beaked whale displayed unusual diving behavior after being exposed to sonar.

Fun link of the week: I’m taking next week off because it’s the day before Thanksgiving here, and I’ll be traveling and then spending four straight days eating my family’s amazing cooking. So this week I give you a video about turkey vocalizations! Bonus: if you have energy, a paper cup, some string, and a paperclip after gorging yourselves on turkey, you can make a simple turkey-ish call.

Animal Bioacoustics

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