Well… it’s that time of year again. I see little flashes of red out of the corner of my eye when I’m out walking; everyone in my Ecological Stats class is talking about it, some with dread, some with stars in their eyes. The air is abuzz with courtship, pretty little love songs, and dare I say it… hormones?
That’s right. The red-winged blackbirds are back.
What? You thought I was talking about some silly holiday?! Tsk tsk.
Let’s be serious. Spring seems to be coming early this year in Oregon (see Danielle’s post about the heavy rain, warm weather, and early frog calls) and the blackbirds are no exception. Red-winged blackbird males sing for a multitude of reasons, but most are directly related to securing and maintaining a mate (and the territory to defend her, house her, and raise lovely red-winged blackbird babies). The part of this whole ordeal that I love most however is the song. Red winged blackbirds produce one of my favorite bird songs, while not as complex as say a Pacific Wren or a Song Sparrow, it might be one of the loveliest sounds on earth. Go on, have a listen.
Admittedly, I am not a bird song (or bird call) aficionado. I’m not even a novice birder, but I do love the morning chorus when I walk by the river, and the evening chorus when I ride my bike home. It is one of the perks of living in the Willamette Valley. As you likely know, however, I am a marine acoustic ecologist by training (see my earlier post on SeaBASS), and I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you that blackbirds aren’t the only boys singing right now.
It’s breeding season for northern hemisphere humpback whales, and males in the tropics and sub-tropics can be heard singing in nearly any hour of the day. Thanks to the Jupiter Project anyone with a broadband connection can listen to the live feed of a hydrophone in the Hawaiian Islands here. By contrast in the high Arctic male bearded seals are singing in and around the sea ice- presumably to establish and defend breeding territories… and impress lady-seals too. Listen to their strange love-song below.
While I eschew Valentine’s Day in general, it does bring me great joy that some of our most genuine expressions of human love, love songs, are something that we share with many animal species. So while I’m unlikely to set aside my Saturday bonfire plans in favor of candy hearts, when I head out this weekend to walk my wild pups by the river and I hear the blackbird singing, I might for a moment imagine he is singing for me.
Have a wonderful weekend friends.
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BRS stands for Behavioral Response Study. My master’s research is all on testing the potential use of a new kind of tag for these types of studies, so I’m very lucky to be participating in such a project for my third field season. Currently, these types of studies use tags that combine fine scale behavioral sensors and passive acoustic recorders (in our case, DTAGs developed by folks at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute) to monitor potential changes in an individual animal’s behavior in response to a controlled sound exposure projected from a boat. This project is really important for investigating exactly how marine mammals are affected by anthropogenic noise such as naval sonar.
The whole database set up….so many wires!WILD in the midst of a busy afternoon is filled with boat tracks, instrument deployments, and animal sightings!
I sort of have a bunch of jobs on the boat. My main duties are as database network manager and operation of WILD (Whale Identification and Logging Database) software that allows us to combine location data from our three research vessels, animal sightings from our visual observers, and instrument deployment from our various teams. I serve as an assistant for Chief Scientist Brandon Southall, helping him coordinate the different science teams and directing the captain when Brandon is out on one of the small boats. I help with radio telemetry, visual observations, and try my best not to get sunburnt. Oh…and this year we have a smoothie bar! So I moonlight as smoothie barista due to my incredible smoothie-making skills.
One of the perks: a sunrise over Catalina Island
There is some downtime while we are on the search for whales (great time for catching up on scholarly reading!) mixed with crazy hectic long days when we’ve got multiple tags out and successful playback sequences. I just wanted to share some pictures of the daily grind, and daily gifts, for those of you who are land locked.
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 😉
