Tony Zhou
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Welcome to our latest episode in Series 5 of Longitudes of Imagination. I’m Tony Zhou, a Longitude fellow at Yale University. Throughout this series, we’ve invited members of the U.S. National Marine Sanctuaries to share their experience towards the Sanctuary Soundscape Monitoring Project. SanctSound is a collaborative project between the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Navy to better understand underwater sound within the 7 national marine sanctuaries in waters off Hawaii, and the East & West coasts.

Today’s episode features conversational highlights I shared with Samara Haver, a postdoctoral scholar at the Pacific Marine Environmental Lab. You’ll learn how sounds produced by marine animals, physical processes (ie. wind, waves), and human activities are measured and assessed. Additionally, Samara kindly shares the technical skillset and personal qualities she believes great scientists possess.

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Samara Haver
I’m a postdoctoral scholar at Oregon State University. And here I work within a cooperative institute that is jointly between NOAA and the Hatfield Marine Science Center at Oregon State University. A lot of the research I do is with National Marine Sanctuaries, National Marine Fishery Service, and then the NOAA line office that I’m officially affiliated with through the university is a Pacific Marine Environmental Lab.

Tony
The theme of our podcast series is on imagination and creativity, and we’ve been exploring how scientists use their creativity and imagination in their day-to-day work. Just as a starting point, how did you get interested in marine research? And what are some of the pivotal moments when you look back at your career and education background and connect the dots to get to where you are now?

Samara
So I definitely didn’t always plan to become a scientist, and certainly not to be a marine scientist. I grew up visiting the coast in Oregon with my family, and I always loved playing in the tide pools and going to the beach, but it didn’t really connect for me that that was a job you could have, or even really being a scientist beyond, you know, sitting and looking at a microscope, that was a career. I was interested in science and so I thought the natural progression would be to study pre-medicine. I really enjoyed learning about the human brain so I ended up majoring in psychology and neuroscience. I wanted to study cognition, I was interested in how people think and perceive things. I also had an opportunity to attend a program called Sea Semester. On this program students live on board a tall ship, learn to sail the ship, and then also do individual oceanography, marine biology projects, which I chose because I just wanted to do something totally different from my major and get out of the state, see something new. I came to realize, ocean science is something that people do have careers in and that I could study. And so I wanted to bring neuroscience and marine science together. And that brought me to marine mammals. Marine mammals have really evolved cognition, really complex. After college, I eventually had an opportunity to intern at a NOAA research lab in Woods Hole. And that lab focused on using passive acoustics to study the ocean, kind of bringing together marine mammals and that cognition. It was studying animal communication and using technology to do this research, and I really liked bringing those things together. And I thought it was really cool to listen underwater. So after working in that research group for a few years, I decided that I wanted to go to grad school and continue my education. I completed a master’s degree at Oregon State University, and then I was fortunate to be awarded a fellowship and that allowed me to complete a PhD.

Tony
Wow. So I’m actually really interested in this because I’ve talked to some friends about this. I do a little bit of machine learning research. And one aspect of- I guess just to talk about conversationally, is learning how different animals in the world, including humans, communicate and encode language, and at least some of the conversations I’ve had are like, how intricate and advanced whales communicate to one another because they will be super far away. And I’m probably totally off when I say this, but they’ll send a message to one another. And they’ll get it and then they’ll meet at the exact location of somewhere. Is that true?

Samara
I’m not sure. We don’t really know what they’re saying, if you will, to each other. It could be something like that, but certainly they are communicating over super long distances. Whales, especially Baleen whales, communicate at these really low frequencies, which travel really efficiently underwater. Sound travels four times the speed it does in water as it does through the air. And then the really low frequency sounds don’t lose as much energy as they’re traveling. It’s just- they’re just pressure waves so they can travel for these really long distances. So yeah, potentially Baleen whales are communicating over many, many kilometers, depending on other things in the environment. It’s quieter and noisier.

Tony
Would you say that they communicate via code, like digital code in a way, or no, that’s different because we use words as a way of encoding our language and meaning. Don’t whales- and I’m not sure if other marine animals do this, but they use frequencies and kind of like bite-sized code?

Samara
Different species have different vocalizations. People think about dolphins whistling, and Humpback whale song, and then some species use echolocation, which is like a sonar basically, which they can use to find prey or detect other things in their environment. They are really long distance communication. Yeah, different species have different sounds, which as scientists, we’re able to listen to those and then know what species it is.

Tony
Okay. Would you mind going more in detail about the current projects that you’re working on right now?

Samara
I have a bunch of different projects, but really the unifying theme of them is trying to understand the soundscape of different environments, and understand what we call the acoustic habitat for these animals. So soundscapes are sounds from animals themselves, and fish and shrimp, any biological creatures. And then there’s also sounds from the environment, like wind and rain and ice, volcanoes, and then sounds from humans from cargo vessels, from cruise ships, from sonar, seismic air guns, anything that humans are doing, that’s adding sound into an environment. And so because a lot of marine animals rely exclusively on sound to communicate, to find food, to navigate, avoid predators, because the ocean is so dark and washes away scent, really sound is what these animals evolved to rely on. So when it’s too noisy from other sound sources, then it becomes a conservation issue for these animals, because they’re not able to basically live out their life history and survive.

Tony
I see. So the amount of sound that additional noise from outside of the environment that gets into the ocean that disrupts their way of living, and their way of life.

Samara
I mean, there’s different ways that sound can be disruptive. You know, it could just be an animal notices a sound, or we can have something which we call masking, which means that maybe one animal is trying to communicate to another animal, but it’s too noisy because there might be a vessel passing above them, or seismic air gun survey happening nearby and the signal can’t be received. Or you know, a sound is really noisy in their environment and that could potentially cause an animal to surface too quickly, or it could cause hearing damage. So there’s several ways that- it’s a spectrum of ways that additional sound can be harmful.

Samara
And what I’m particularly focused on is looking at chronic noise. So NOAA has ways, scientists have ways of measuring sound from loud sources that have a very clear stop and start point and saying, How loud is too loud, and when is this basically too much and when it might be harmful? Though when we’re talking about things like shipping noise or continuous vessel noise that goes on and on without a really clear start and end point, it’s hard to define how much that could be harmful, or even being able to say that it’s harmful at all, because you can’t really isolate it in the same way as a single loud sound.

Tony
Right. Would vessels be one of the biggest contributors to this additional sound and noise? Or are there others in the top five or top three rank?

Samara
Yeah, so it comes from all different sources. But when we study sound and environments, terrestrial or marine, we’re looking at the frequency or the pitch of the sound, and then also the intensity. And so when I’m looking at vessel noise and these chronic sources of noise and how that might impact Baleen whales, I’m focused exclusively on low frequencies, really low pitch sounds that can travel quite a distance in the ocean. So there’s also high pitch sounds that can be disruptive, but those…we’re kind of dividing up the spectrum to look at different sources.

Tony
So when you set up an experiment, what are some assumptions that you go into that experiment with?

Samara
So when we set up an experiment to actually get it rolling, basically what we’re doing is we’re taking an underwater microphone called a hydrophone and putting it in a waterproof pressurized case with a bunch of batteries and flash drive cards. And we’re leaving that in the ocean to just record that data for us. An audio file basically, which we can then go back and look at and figure out what’s going on in the environment.

Samara
First, we’re hoping that our equipment works and that we record good data. We do research ahead of time based on previous studies, based on what researchers have found in other fields of where to put these instruments. You know that this is an interesting environment important to animals where we want to listen. And then we’re also hoping that the instruments that we also put in place to help us get the hydrophones back, that those work as well. Because we put these in the ocean for sometimes up to two years.

Tony
You never bring them back up and just leave them?

Samara
Oh, no, we do, we do. Yeah. So they’re anchored to the seafloor, depending on how deep it is, they’re either sitting on the seafloor, if it’s say, less than 100 meters, or if it’s much deeper, they’re suspended in the water column. And we use a float to keep the instrument in place, but there’s no surface expression. So we can’t just reach down and pull it up the way you might with a buoy. We have these acoustic releases that when we go back to the site, we can use essentially a special instrument to talk to the releases and tell the release to unhook itself from the anchor. And then the float will bring the hydrophone back to us. They are archival, the ones that that I work with primarily, so that means we don’t get any data back until we get the instrument. So we kind of always have our fingers crossed, you know, putting it in, bringing it back, hoping that everything went well, so that we can do the next step, the research.

Tony
Have you ever lost the equipment to the ocean?

Samara
Yes, unfortunately it happens. You know, sometimes things just don’t work right. The most disappointing is when you get it back, and then there isn’t any data on it.

Tony
Is that because the instrument wasn’t able to capture it, or there just weren’t any animals that went by?

Samara
I mean, when something happens with the instrument, we don’t even have data to look at. If we get the data back and we don’t hear any animals, then that’s an interesting result. Because we’re learning something about that environment, you know, how come we didn’t hear any animals? What’s going on here?

Tony
Okay, let’s say you get the data, you’ve analyzed it. What are some conclusions- or maybe solutions, maybe that’s a better word. What are some solutions that you and your team, and maybe people in this field, have come up with to reduce the noise, because I don’t think vessels are going anywhere anytime soon. I think they’re probably just gonna be in the ocean. And it seems like with ocean research, and the way that the world wants to expand cities, there’s probably going to be more things put into the water. So what are some solutions for how to declutter and remove this noise?

Samara
So first of all, you’re exactly right. And ships are getting bigger and faster. And we know that bigger and faster ships are noisier. So sound levels from vessels are increasing. And then we also know that animals are impacted by this. And so trying to figure out how to do something about it. Some of the projects that I’m working on are with National Marine Sanctuaries, and also with the National Park Services interested in what kind of management actions might be appropriate for animal conservation. So like you said, vessels aren’t going away. But managers do have some tools, like voluntary vessel slowdowns during certain times of the year when we know that sensitive species are present, or monitoring particular areas during certain times of the year. So Glacier Bay National Park is a great example of this. During the summer months—which is the peak tourism season in southeast Alaska, it’s also when Humpback whales are they’re feeding and harbor seals are breeding there—they have a vessel quota system, which essentially restricts the number of vessels that can go in and out of the park. It’s harder in more open areas. But some of the questions that we’re asking, is looking at these environments and trying to get baselines to understand, you know, what’s going on here? What animals are here, places that aren’t as well studied as Glacier Bay, for example. And the question is, When are animals here? When do they need management actions? Or do they need management actions at all? Because if we put a hydrophone down and we listen to the environment, and sure, maybe there’s some vessel noise, but we also might hear a ton of sound from animals and it doesn’t- as far as we can tell the vessel noise isn’t overwhelming the soundscape in the same way that it might be in a more urban area, more urban soundscape, then we have a different situation. There’s only so many resources available for these types of management actions, even if it’s just the time that people have to commit towards these problems. They are trying to identify where attention should be, where resources should be directed.

Tony
Right. And so it seems like currently it is kind of in the developmental stage of coming up with where things are needed, and at what rate and what quantity. But what is the ideal hope that these experiments lead to eventually?

Samara
It’s a great question. And I am a scientist, not a policymaker, but the cool thing about sound and ocean noise, as some people would describe it, is that it’s not like other types of pollution. If you stop the sound source, it just goes away. There’s no cleanup. Obviously harm can be done, but it’s not like an oil spill where it can take decades to clean up. The sound is, it’s just energy. It just dissipates. So a lot of focus on mitigating sound is looking at vessel technologies, how to make vessels quieter, and what needs to be done to potentially retrofit older vessels and designing newer vessels that are quieter and then looking at where vessels are moving in the ocean. Are there particular shipping lanes or routes that intersect with important habitats for endangered or threatened species? So a lot of pieces of a puzzle.

Tony
Yeah, I know. It sounds very complex, but also very interesting at the same time. Do you have any unexpected results that you had that were either very motivating in a way that surprised you, in a positive way, or unexpected results maybe you had hoped or expected something and then it didn’t come out that way?

Samara
Sure. Yeah. So that has happened many times for the years that I’ve been doing this science, but an example in this case, it’d be…One of my dissertation chapters, I looked at the overall soundscape in Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary. We’d never done any recording there and trying to look at the soundscape and understand the different sound sources. Cordell Bank is right near San Francisco and Oakland, and so it’s a major shipping port, a lot of vessels going in and out delivering to those major ports. One of the parts of the project was looking for vocalizations from specific Baleen whale species to identify them in different times of the year. That area had a voluntary vessel slowdown in the winter months. And what we actually found is, by using passive acoustics to supplement existing visual observations, we found that whales were likely in the area in an extended season beyond what was already known from the visual observation. So that was a cool result because it gave National Marine Sanctuary managers and scientists and stakeholders information that whales were there during these other times of the year, and potentially looking at adapting management in response to that.

Tony
Yeah. Okay. So now just some rapid fire questions for students who are interested in marine research, whether they started already in marine research, or they started in a different field and want to get into marine research. What is some advice that you’d have for them to either continue down the course or pivot into this field?

Samara
It’s important to not only master the field that they’re interested in, but also practice writing, and public speaking, and skills to work with other people. These aren’t things that are necessarily emphasized as much in the sciences, as a lot of, you know, coding and science classes, but to be a successful scientist you also need to be able to write and talk about it.

Tony
What do you think are qualities outside of, let’s say, a professional skill set that one would have to have to be a successful scientist?

Samara
I would say determined. It’s important to not give up at roadblocks. And then they have to be passionate, because it’s really hard to convince other people to care about these things if you don’t care yourself.

Tony
Yeah. Do publications matter?

Samara
Unfortunately, yes.

Tony
Why unfortunately?

Samara
Well, because I think publications are only valuable if other people can read them, and it costs a lot of money to publish open access, and that’s a big hurdle for students who are already trying to raise money for the research projects, for their own tuition, et cetera. And there’s also a lot of emphasis on the scientific manuscripts, which aren’t necessarily written in a publicly accessible way. So yeah, it’s really important because that’s how we document the science, but it takes time away from telling other people, finding ways to communicate it in less technical ways, and also, it’s really expensive.

Tony
Yeah, absolutely. Would you recommend students to pursue a PhD if they wanted to do marine research?

Samara
If they love doing research, they should pursue a PhD because that is, that’s the whole job, is doing research. So if you love it, then it’s a fantastic opportunity.

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Tony
It was really interesting to hear how Samara transferred her background in psychology to wildlife sciences, where she now explores the acoustic habitat of marine animals. As a conservation challenge, analyzing these soundscapes to better understand how sound can disrupt an animal’s behavior is a critical step towards developing solutions to protect the ocean and marine life.

We hope you enjoyed the last episode of this series. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript.  Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Melisa Acimis
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Melisa Acimis, Longitude fellow from Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey.

Welcome to our ongoing series on imagination, where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that is helping advance understanding in ocean science and space technology! In this series, we spoke with scientists about their work in underwater sound monitoring in our oceans.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with John Ryan, senior research scientist at MBARI. 

As an economics student I was interested to hear about the effects of sonar on living beings. We started our conversation with his role in the field.

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John Ryan
In order to understand life in the ocean, we need to understand not just the forms of life, but also their environment, their very dynamic environment. Oceanography is an integration of multiple science disciplines: biology, chemistry, physics, even geology. All of those together allow us to understand life in the ocean.

I finished graduate studies on the east coast of the United States in a state called Rhode Island. There I learned to study physical and biological oceanography. And then it was time to take that next step after school and that is a postdoc, a postdoctoral research position. So I came to MBARI for a two-year postdoc… 24 years ago. I’m a biological oceanographer at MBARI. MBARI, by the way, stands for Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. So we’re a nonprofit research institute, affiliated with a public education center called the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and our job is to develop and apply new technologies to advance ocean science. So on any given day, I might work with autonomous robotic submarines. In fact, we’re starting an experiment tomorrow that will have three cooperating autonomous robotic submarines (it’s amazing) studying microscopic algae in the ocean, particularly the kind of algae that produce harmful algal blooms. My work could also involve listening in the ocean.

Melisa
Our main subject.

John
Yeah, studying ocean sound. For that, I do both research to understand natural sound, from ocean life—because many ocean life forms use sound in all of their essential life activities… so we can hear their lives, really—but we also study ocean noise and how human impacts can negatively affect the ocean soundscape and the lives of ocean animals that use sound.

Melisa
Great. What is your favorite thing about your work? And is there a philosophy behind your actions?

John
My favorite thing about my work is understanding the beauty and complexity of life in the ocean. I love it every day. My second favorite thing, or it’s equally favorite, I love to share the excitement of ocean discovery. I love to do education and outreach. And I get to do that in my work, which is fortunate. I won’t just engage the public in lectures, for example. We also work on public exhibits, technologies where people can walk into a free and open public education center, push buttons on an exhibit and learn about the ocean soundscape.

Melisa
What is this exhibit? Can you elaborate on that?

John
So imagine that you walk up to a large screen, and in front of you is a beautiful image of the ocean off coastal California. And there are a series of buttons embedded in this graphic and you can push a button and then in front of you on the screen, ocean sound will come to life, but you won’t know what that sound is from, you will only see a visual representation of the sound. A line will move through that visual representation as you hear it. So you’re fully engaged with the sound. It’s a way for people to engage with the sound first, guess what it could be, and learn what it is. We built two of those so far and I have a third to go to another public education center — because where we live, there is a lot of tourism. So people come here to vacation, which also gives us a chance to reach many people with this knowledge through our exhibits.

My philosophy- I was going to be in the world of business. I did this job in business to see what it’d be like and I realized, when I’m 50 years old, I won’t be happy because I won’t have contributed anything to make the world a better place. I will have made money for a business and that can be healthy. You can support a good economy. That’s great, but I wanted to do something that would help us live in greater harmony with nature. Because all around me I saw how we were destroying nature. So I changed direction and I chose to major in biology because I thought that would be very important to living in harmony with nature because it’s the science of life. And if we understand the science of life, we can understand how to be harmonious with it.

Melisa
Great answers. I’m impressed with your idealistic way. Can you summarize the ocean sound monitoring project in a few sentences for a lay audience?

John
Yes, the importance of understanding ocean sound is that the ocean is a world of sound. It is a strange world to us, but one in which sound travels very powerfully. It travels far, and it travels fast. And what that means is, ocean life has evolved to use sound in so many ways. So just by listening, we can learn so much about ocean life, about their life activities: communication, navigation, foraging, socialization, reproduction. We can hear it. It also means that we have to be careful about the noise we introduce to the ocean, because it can cause harm.

Melisa
I read about how far sound travels underwater and I came across some key words such as sound channel, hydrophone, and by doing a little of this research I have seen SOFAR. Could you speak about the nature of sound underwater? And how that may be significant for marine life?

John
Yes, you mentioned the sound channel or the SOFAR channel. That is a location in the ocean, the location being depth, really, because it spreads out across the ocean. The sound channel extends across an ocean basin, 10,000 kilometers of the Pacific. And what it is, it’s a place where there is a minimum sound speed. And just the way sound energy travels through the ocean, that minimum in the sound speed that is determined by the physical properties of the water, traps the sound energy and allows it to travel farther than it otherwise could. So that’s a unique thing. And so that’s how we can hear sound produced at one side of an ocean basin and all the way on the other side, if that sound has a sufficient intensity, source level, and a low frequency — because low frequency sounds travel much farther than high frequency sounds.

And then you mentioned also finding the word hydrophone. Well, a hydrophone is just an underwater microphone. And what it is recording, at the very least it is recording the pressure variations that result from a sound wave just as the very process that allows us to hear sound in air. So we record those pressure oscillations that result from the sound. And we record that at a very high sample rate — in our case, we’re sampling sound pressure at more than a quarter million times per second, so a very high sample rate. And the reason we do that is because many animals in the ocean are using sound that’s far above our limit of hearing. So if we’re going to detect their sound production, their use of sound, we have to sample at a very high rate. For example, some species of dolphins or sperm whales will produce echolocation clicks (to help them find their food in a dark ocean) that have a frequency more than five times greater than our upper limit of hearing. So it’s very high frequency. We sample pressure in the ocean with a hydrophone at a very high sample rate, then we can study many sources of sound. Since we’re on the topic, there are really three categories of sound that we can study: biological sound, or biophony; sounds of the Earth, or geophony; and sounds of human activities, anthropophony. We study all of those.

Melisa
Could you elaborate on the effects of sound in the ocean on mammals?  What should be done to reduce adverse effects?

John
There are really four ways that our noise can have a negative impact on ocean animals. The first is interference with communication. It’s called masking. It’s like if you and I were trying to have this conversation, and someone was operating a jackhammer next to my chair, it would be really difficult for us to have that conversation, and in many cases, we are preventing them (marine animals) from communicating with one another. A second harmful effect of our noise is a behavioral disturbance. We can cause a population to move away from a source of noise, when in fact that population needs to be there in order to survive because their food resource is there. So we can cause them to be malnourished, for example. And then a third way that we can have a negative effect is to cause acute or chronic stress. You know how in people we can measure stress hormone levels, like cortisol and such, and we can feel that stress. We know stress has many negative effects on our lives, in our bodies. We’ve learned that our noise also has caused stress in marine mammals. The last effect is that if a sound is so loud, so intense, it could actually damage body tissues. So it could destroy their hearing, temporarily or permanently, it can harm their hearing. And there are even indirect effects. For example, one of the deepest diving mammals, the beaked whale, it lives (forages) so deep in the ocean, and there have been these very dramatic occurrences of beaked whales washing up on the beach and dying. And the reason they died is because they experienced very loud sound, very loud sonar. The sound didn’t cause their death (directly), but they panicked. They swam to the surface very fast. And if you go from a very deep depth at high pressure to the surface at low pressure too quickly, air bubbles come out of solution in your bloodstream, and it causes terrible things.

Melisa
As part of our imagination theme, we are interested to learn if there is room for imagination in your line of work. If so, could you speak about that and share an example of your approach to coming up with or developing new ideas?

John
Imagination, as you know, is important in everything humanity can do. And it’s very true in science. Let’s talk about two areas: research and education. For research, it’s very important to imagine what it must be like for the life of a species that you’re studying. So for example, imagine weighing 150 metric tons, but feeling weightless. And imagine speaking with only your voice, no technology, and being heard by your friend 100 kilometers away. Imagine needing to eat tons of krill (shrimp) every day in order to survive. (This describes the life of a blue whale.) This imagination gives us a sense of what it’s like for the species that we want to understand and protect. And some of these species (like blue whales) are still endangered. They’re still listed as endangered because their populations were decimated by commercial whaling. So we have to imagine what it is like for that species to survive, and better yet thrive, to recover from the harm that was done by commercial whaling. And then imagination immediately comes in when you enter the world of data. You know, one hydrophone, one little tiny hydrophone, collects two terabytes of data in a single month, 24 terabytes in a year. One little instrument. And so here you are, you’ve got this year of data, a mountain of data; what do you do with it? How do you begin to sift through all that data to find the sounds produced by different species? And each species can produce different sounds. How do you sift through that to understand what species are living here in this region, in this biologically rich, bio-diverse habitat? Who’s here? When are they here? What are they doing? It takes a lot of imagination to apply analytical tools to a mountain of data and to come out with understanding. Lots of imagination. I guess what I’d also say is that we’re never just working with sound data. We get other types of information from satellites that orbit the Earth and look down at the environment and tell us, how is it changing from year to year, from day to day? And how did the animals respond to that?

And then I think, very briefly, that it takes a lot of imagination to translate from the language of science into the language that everyone understands. Science is full of its terminology and its complexities. But your job when you are taking that information into education is to use your imagination to create communication that people not only understand, but in a way that allows them to connect with ocean life. If people don’t have any awareness, science can bring them awareness. But if people don’t feel any connection, why should they care about that (species or topic)? Well, then it’s hard for them to understand why we should work for conservation to protect these beautiful ocean environments and species. There is imagination and learning to help people connect.

Melisa
Could you tell us one thing you would change in your career life? What would you say to your younger self?

John
What would I change in my career life? I think I would have taken the pressure off myself at a younger age, because as a young professional scientist I was a little bit, how do I put it, anxious or nervous that I was never doing enough. That my work was not good enough.

Melisa
You’re a perfectionist.

John
Yes. Thank you. You are right. And in that way, I think I caused a little bit of suffering for myself needlessly. That also caused me to not communicate as well as I could have about what I want to do with my career, how I value my contributions. Instead, I looked to other people to assure me that I was contributing enough. I think what I would have said to my younger self is: Relax, have confidence that this path that you chose is right for you and that people value your contributions and enjoy your work. Don’t worry so much about what you’re doing. Just focus on making a meaningful contribution, and that’s enough.

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Melisa
Talking to John Ryan was illuminating. Since his way of thought of ocean and biology is so holistic, I realize that every action I make gives a birth to new consequences over animals in the ocean, especially our noise pollution turning to pressure on these animals. Also, he likes educating people to make a connection between these species and us so that we have a motivation to save the planet and have empathy.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

Jacqueline Buskop
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Jacqueline Buskop, a Longitude fellow from Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Welcome to our ongoing series on imagination, where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that is helping advance understanding in ocean science and space technology! In this series, we spoke with members of the SanctSound project that is managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Navy. It is a project to better understand underwater sounds within the U.S. national marine sanctuaries.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with Eden Zang, research specialist at the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary, located on the island of Maui. She is a contractor through a company called Lynker Technologies since 2018.

As an environmental science student, I was curious about the deployment of underwater technology and its recovery in a harsh seawater environment. We started our conversation with a discussion of the SanctSound project and how her work in the Hawaiian Islands is different from other marine sanctuaries.

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Eden Zang
The Office of National Marine Sanctuaries has sanctuaries all over the US, from Florida all the way to American Samoa. We fall right in the middle of the Pacific. So we’re like underwater national parks, and at the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale Sanctuary we are a single species sanctuary, which is unique that we focus on the humpback whale and their habitat here in the Hawaiian Islands. One particular project that I’ve been involved in since 2018 is a project that’s called SanctSound. This project focuses on understanding and characterizing the soundscapes, which is basically every sound that is in an environment, but the categorizing this so that we have these baseline understandings of what’s going on in our sanctuaries. This involves seven different sanctuaries around the US, as well as one Marine National Monument here in the Pacific.

Jacqueline
Wow, that’s really cool. How does your work at this sanctuary differ from the other sanctuaries or other locations?

Eden
Our sanctuary is focused on a single species, the humpback whale, specifically the North Pacific population of humpback whales, whereas another sanctuary might focus on iconic reefs or more of an ecosystem-based management. Previously I have focused on different marine mammals, different animals in the marine environment, including invertebrates all the way up to this charismatic megafauna. So it’s been really great to hone in on this and really get to know the species. They’re really an interesting one, sometimes people can say, oh, you know, we know a lot about humpback whales, or they’re pretty common or whatever. But you know, I think they’re pretty mysterious species, and we’re always learning something new. It’s kind of like, the more you know, the less you know.

Jacqueline
I noticed visiting the sanctuary’s website, there’s a blurb on the front page about the intersection of ocean stewardship and Hawaiian culture. Since you’re in such a unique location, could you describe what it means to be an ocean steward and how the sanctuary coexists with indigenous Hawaiian heritage?

Eden
Yes, that’s a great question. We’re working to protect not only ocean resources, areas of important scientific study, but also these important heritage and cultural sites. And here in the Hawaiian Islands, we do have a very unique situation where we do have up in the Marine National Monument very significant cultural sites, here in the main Hawaiian Islands as well. So it’s really important that we not only reach out to indigenous people to understand the history and but also understand the stewardship that their ancestors and they currently are doing to work to protect the resources. So there’s a lot to be learned from indigenous cultures, not only from a historical point, but also understanding the land and the ocean, and here in Hawaii that’s all connected. You know, there’s a very big connection between what we call mauka, which is the mountain, to makai, which is the ocean.

Jacqueline
Indigenous cultures are such a huge part of the Hawaiian Islands and hold a significant impact. You could say the same for geological impacts to the island too. The Hawaiian Islands are a volcanic hotspot chain, and the marine sanctuary is close to the summit of a massive undersea volcanic mountain range. Eden, has volcanism affected your work in Hawaii since you’ve been there?

Eden
Yeah, that’s really interesting, because while we focus on other aspects in our research department, one of the main things that we do focus on is underwater acoustics. One of the biggest things and that introduces sound into any marine environment is what we call geophony. So naturally occurring sounds, which often are seismic events or can be volcanic events, and so that is something that can be heard on our recorders here. So fortunately, none of our recorders have ever been covered by underwater explosions. That would be pretty deep. But we’re on the other side of the island there. But other than just having it introduced into the soundscape hasn’t affected it too much.

Jacqueline
Obviously the whales are one of those players in the soundscape. What else do you guys hear in those recordings?

Eden
When we look at a soundscape, there’s three main things that we’re listening to. We’re listening to the geophony, like I mentioned, so naturally occurring sounds, either from seismic events or things like that, which also includes physical processes like rain, winds, waves, and then the biophony. So that’s where the humpback whales fall into. So you’re hearing different whale species, different dolphin species, different fish that do make sound in the underwater environment. And then of course humans. We are in the marine environment as well and we’re introducing sounds. We have things like boat noise, vessel noise, you know, scuba bubbles, all of those different things we can hear in our underwater recorders.

Jacqueline
Could you summarize your current role and how you overcome any challenges?

Eden
I’m mostly focused on fieldwork and data analysis. Fieldwork is just basically categorized as going out and doing the data collection. So a lot of our data collection includes going out on our vessel, which is called the research vessel Kohala. We do local work around the island of Maui, and we do things like vessel surveys to count humpback whales. We do deployments to deploy our underwater acoustic mooring packages. Then once we get all of that data back, we are analyzing that data and interpreting it and figuring out what it all means. I would definitely say of course, fieldwork is pretty fun. And it is one of my favorite things to do because you get to see these animals in their natural environment and just observe, that’s what we’re doing out there. We’re not trying to alter their behavior at all, but we’re trying to just observe and understand what they’re doing. And I think it’s just such a unique thing to be able to watch these animals. And they’re so unique from any other place that I’ve seen humpback whales. Hawaii is just very different in the way- the numbers of them, the density of these animals, and so to be able to see it in such high numbers is really, really exciting and really cool. And it never gets old.

Jacqueline
You mentioned that technology and data analysis are a huge part of what you do. How has your relationship with technology and data analysis changed throughout the years?

Eden
It’s really interesting because there are different opportunities out there, especially with machine learning. That’s something that I don’t know a whole lot about, but other people do and have reached out to us. And so one particular partnership is with Google. They were working with another office of NOAA, another line office. They were looking at doing an automatic analysis detector of humpback whales in a particular area where it’s not as high-density as the Hawaiian Islands. But what was really interesting is we were able to then work with Google, train the model to then work on our data, which has a really high density in animals. So that’s been really interesting to be able to work with external folks to lean on their expertise to help us in our jobs.

Jacqueline
Very cool. Machine learning has all sorts of applications and I feel like every day I learn about a new one. So applications to cetology, which for our listeners is the study of whales, dolphins, and porpoises.

Could you tell me a little bit about how the technology is deployed so you can collect data?

Eden
For our acoustic mooring packages, what we do is we send down an instrument on a temporary anchor. And it’s then attached to an acoustic release, which is then attached to some line with the acoustic recorder on that, and then a float, a very heavy-duty float. So it has a lot of tension and it allows the package to sit vertically in the water column. And we can deploy these for up to six months, eight months at a time. And, in fact, in some of our deployments, they’re out there for a year. They’re not necessarily recording that long, but we don’t have the ability to go recover them because of the remoteness of the location, which is in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. But when we do recover them, what we do is we send a signal to the acoustic release, and then it just unscrews. And that float that has all that tension on that, once it unscrews, it just pops to the surface, and then we’re able to recover it. So we do actually have to physically recover these instruments to get the data from them. These acoustic recorders, they’re really handy because you can program them to record at different duty cycles. For the SanctSound project we were actually recording continuously, so 24/7. But for other areas like the national marine monument, we wanted to extend our recording time as much as possible. We had that on a 50% duty cycle. So recording 15 minutes every 30 minutes. So we were able to get quite a long period of recording, I think from October to- some of them were May, June timeframe.

Jacqueline
Have you ever had any difficulties recovering some of the tech from the water?

Eden
Oh, I would like to say no, but we have. It’s always scary when you send down several thousand dollars’ worth of equipment to the bottom of the ocean and cross your fingers that you get it back. Some things that can interfere with the recovery of an instrument can be biofouling. So if it gets biofouled, which is just organisms growing on different parts of the release, if it biofouls it enough, it won’t allow it to release. So that has happened before. Of course, sharks live in the ocean. And so sometimes sharks are very curious about our acoustic mooring packages. We suspect some of ours that have not been able to be recovered might have been chewed on a little bit by a shark and the float might have released from it. And so we can still talk to our moorings, we know they’re there, but we can’t get them back up, so in that case we might be able to schedule some technical divers to recover those. Sometimes the technology and everything isn’t as great as you want it to be to be able to recover it, but most of the time it works.

Jacqueline
From the data that you recover, do you plan to create an action plan?

Eden
So SanctSound, one of the big priorities for that was to create a repository for all of this data. Now that we have wrapped up this four years of data collection, anybody in the public can go to our website and look, and if they’re interested in particular sounds in their area, different data products, they can really go in there and delve in and explore what we discovered. So moving forward, we do want to continue some of that effort. And we’ll continue to archive our data nationally so that it is publicly accessible to other scientists, members of the public, whoever wants to access it. So not only was it interesting for us, and we had a purpose of characterizing the soundscapes in these regions, but we also want to make sure that it’s publicly accessible, and so that it’s out there for everyone to use.

Jacqueline
Accessibility is so important. I love the concept of democratization of science, and making it easily accessible for people who are outside of the fields to learn a little bit more.

Eden
Yeah, and it’s actually a great resource for grad students. I mention that, you know, for Longitude, since you do work with current students and students that have just graduated. If you don’t have resources for a project, but you’re very interested in a question regarding underwater noise, you can use this data and we can share the resources. There’s no use in recreating the wheel. If we have the data and you have the questions there, then you might as well use it. The ultimate goal in my eyes is that we’re protecting these areas, we’re learning more about these areas. We’re informing management. We’re informing the public. There’s no reason to, like you said, hold it close to the chest. It’s out there for everybody.

Jacqueline
What form is the data in?

Eden
So the data right and now is- you can get it in the raw format of just wav files. So it’s easily accessible that way, you can just download it and get it from the website that way or from the National Archive. And then also we have some other products that we worked on. So revisiting our discussion regarding technology, there was some effort for this project as well to standardize processing of the data. And so folks were able to create programs that helped us automate our analysis a little bit better. So for instance, a dolphin detector picking up whistles in the data set that we can then manually verify, or a vessel detector. There’s different products that came out of this that are publicly accessible as well. So lots on there to explore and to utilize.

Jacqueline
So Eden, I was curious, being from Arizona, what drew you to the field of Marine Science and to work specifically with humpback whales?

Eden
It’s really interesting, because it’s really come full circle for me. I was in Arizona working in nonprofit fundraising. I was established there. But I’ve always had this curiosity about the marine environment and about animals specifically. I don’t know what it was, but one time I was watching a documentary on the killer whales of New Zealand, and how they use cultural dissemination of hunting practices, and I was just so fascinated with it. And I kind of thought, now’s the time that if I’m really curious about this for me to go and explore this. And so I started to do some research. And I said, you know, Hawaii looks like a very interesting place. There’s the humpback whale song, a lot of animal behavior questions wrapped up in that. So I packed my bags, came with two suitcases and didn’t know anybody. And said, I give myself six months to try to make this happen.

My background is actually in communication. It’s not in science. So when I got out here, I started interning and volunteering wherever I could and taking any job that was involved in marine science. I didn’t start out with humpback whales. I actually started out working at our local aquarium, working with fish and invertebrates. But again, I said anything that was ever involved in marine science I would take. It took a while for me to get back full circle. So the humpback whales are what drew me to Hawaii, but I didn’t actually start to get to work with them specifically in a scientific role until 2018. So it was a lot of persistence and hard work to get there, and lots of jobs to be able to come full circle.

Jacqueline
I do have to ask, Eden, do you have a favorite humpback whale that frequents the sanctuary?

Eden
Oh, I can’t play favorites, right. And you know what, to be honest, there are so many that visit our waters. So I don’t necessarily have a particular favorite. But you know, one of my favorite things to do is take Fluke ID shots, and that’s how we actually identify individual whales. The fluke is the tail of the animal, so the underside is basically like a fingerprint. And so we can take a picture of that, and then it would be interesting- then we can go back into our catalog and then say, oh, you know, we saw, so and so, I won’t give them a name—Frank, let’s say, or something like that—and see that we’ve seen them year over year. So that is something that different researchers have focused on in the past. Another introduction of technology that has really helped researchers in the field is something called Happy Whale. It’s a database that you can then submit all of your Fluke IDs, and then it matches kind of using facial recognition, but for the fluke, to see where the matches are. So you can see if you know where your whale has been spotted by not only yourself, but other researchers or other members of the community. Anybody, if you’re out on a whale watch, can take a picture of a fluke and submit it to Happy Whale, then you can see where and if anybody has ever seen your whale before. So pretty cool.

Jacqueline
I wonder if anyone has reconstructed their tracks from location to location?

Eden
Yeah, actually Happy Whale will do that. And I also get alerts when a whale that I’ve submitted previously is seen again, I’ll get an alert to say oh, you know, it’s been spotted up in Alaska now, or it’s been spotted over in Mexico. And so it’s really interesting to have that history. So I always get excited when I see an email from Happy Whale in my inbox.

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Jacqueline
Growing up, whales had a special place in my heart because of their familial nature and charisma. Speaking with Eden Zang gave insight into one of the most unique ways to study these charismatic creatures: soundscape ecology. She revealed the three main things that acoustic researchers listen to–geophony, biophony, and anthropophony, and explained the ups and downs of collecting this data in the field.

What I found to be most important is that the SanctSound project revolves around accessibility. The data collected by the SanctSound researchers is publicly available on their interactive portal, so anyone with an interest in acoustic data from varying marine environments can listen to our oceans.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript.  Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

Laurel Chen 
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Laurel Chen, Longitude fellow from Rice University.

Welcome to our Longitudes of Imagination series where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that is helping advance understanding in ocean science and space technology!

In this series, we spoke with the members of the SanctSound project that is managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Navy. It is a project to better understand underwater sounds within the U.S. national marine sanctuaries.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with Ms. Lindsey Peavey Reeves, a West Coast Region Sanctuary Soundscape Monitoring Project Coordinator at National Marine Sanctuary Foundation in California.

As a fellow and biomedical engineer by training, I was interested to hear about the synergistic intersection between our work, which is grounded by high technicality. But I was also interested in hearing about what the SanctSound project was, and the impacts the humans and infrastructure had on the ocean. We started our conversation with a deeper dive into her current position, as well as what her role entailed.       

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Lindsey Peavey Reeves
I am the sanctuary soundscape monitoring coordinator for the west coast of the United States. I work for the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, which is housed under NOAA, and I am on staff at the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation. It’s a little complicated, but it’s through an MOU, a financial agreement that this government office has with the Sanctuary Foundation, which is hugely beneficial in lots of ways. One of those ways is that they can hire staff to do these specialized roles, take on these specialized roles, which is what I’m doing on the west coast. So I’m based in Santa Barbara, California, but I work really closely with all of the five sanctuaries on the west coast of the US, from the Canadian border, the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, down through California. So we have the greater Farallones sanctuary, the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary, Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, and then Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary. I work really closely with those five sanctuaries to monitor underwater sound in and around the sanctuary. We work with a really large network of partners to accomplish this, because it’s a really large undertaking. It’s hard for us to do it solely as one organization. So we work across a lot of different organizations. We had over 50 individuals that were a part of that project, over 20 different organizations, so that’s kind of the magnitude when I’m talking about partnerships. It’s quite large, both on the coming up with the resources to make it happen, but also the implementation of it as well.

But what do I do in particular? Mostly it is coordination. So I do jump on boats a lot, and do a lot of the field work myself. As I said, I’m based in Santa Barbara, California, so Channel Islands is in my backyard and easy for me to access and to help out with fieldwork. But some of those sanctuaries I mentioned are quite far away. And so what I do is work with the staff and the partners that are in those local areas and we coordinate the vessel time, getting all the gear in the right place at the right time in and out of the water, and just making sure that we’re trying to collect data as continuously as possible.

I also work with a team of analysts that are also scattered all around the west coast, and even beyond that. They are really focused on working with the data once it comes out of the water. We have all of these standardized procedures that we use across the entire national network of our sound monitoring project. Our west coast team of analysts uses those procedures to process the data and come up with standardized data products. So things like sound levels over time where we might tease out a specific sound source that we’re interested in, like humpback whale calls or fish chorusing, snapping shrimp sounds, things like that. I do a lot of the coordination of the fieldwork, data collection, and then the data processing. And then we also have this parallel process that we feed our data products in. That’s the archive of the raw data and the data products. And this is what makes this project really impactful because we have open access to our methods, but also our results.

One of the most challenging but rewarding things that I do is bridging the science that we’re producing to the management applications and how we’re actually going to solve some of these conservation problems. Some of that is producing peer reviewed publications or contributing to them, working with the academic community, and then some of that is really just working with our staff at the state and federal levels to try to better manage our marine protected areas and our protected resources.

Laurel
Thank you so much for that really comprehensive rundown, Lindsey. I was hearing you talk, I was just… I felt so empowered by how broad your work and this organization reaches. It seems to be not only science-related, but there’s a lot of social and governance-related things with it as well. So to me, that makes me really happy. I studied engineering in college but I really- this year was the only year where I actually got to branch out, take a few more humanities courses. It’s makes me really happy to hear what you are working on right now, and this bigger position and role really brings a lot of people together, a lot of people in different specialties to really create this richer understanding of something. And it’s open-access as well, which is something that I really think was super cool, because now everyone can access it if they want to learn more about not just SanctSound, but also the other projects that you’ve been working on too. So that’s super cool. You touched on this a little bit, but I was actually really curious to hear what you loved most about the SanctSound project.

Lindsey
Yeah, sure. One of the things I love about soundscape monitoring just as a discipline is that it’s holistic. You actually gave a good description of how it’s holistic, like our approach to it, with needing to work with people and building relationships and trust and expertise, as I’ve said, but from a scientific aspect I love that it’s holistic in that we’re looking at entire ecosystems and how they’re functioning. In our case, we’re doing stationary monitoring mostly, and so we’re looking really intensely at one place but over time. You know, we’re listening to all of the different sounds that are happening in concert. The biological sounds, fish, snapping shrimp, whales, all of the fun critters that we think about when we think of marine ecosystems, but also the biophysical sound that we might not think are noisy, but they actually can be quite noisy at times, like tides and currents, wind and waves, earthquakes, things like that. Hurricanes. So we’re listening to all of those things happening at the same time: rain storms passing by at the same time that dolphins are chatting it up. And then also anthropogenic sounds. So all of the things that humans are doing, all the human activities that are happening in these coastal areas, in our case in these national marine sanctuaries. We do have some remote ones, but on the west coast we have quite a few that have strongholds in the coastal regions. So we have military activities happening, we have vessel traffic, whether it’s large commercial tankers or fishing vessels, or recreational vessels, dive boats, things like that. Kayaks. I mean, all kinds of ways that we are accessing these spaces now. And so we’re able to listen to all of those things happening at the same time. I think that’s really powerful. And one of the things that I like most about this project, because we can really tease apart each one of those things individually, because we do have such amazing, really smart people working on this project that can do things like artificial intelligence, and use these automated techniques to draw out specific sound sources, if we just want to listen to killer whales, we can do that. So if an event happens, we can detect that, and so we can detect a disturbance to the ecosystem. I just love that we have that capability and that power in this holistic sampling approach.

I also think that underwater sound in general is very relatable to people. We use sound. Most people who are able to hear really value that sense, and they really relate to how important it is for an underwater organism to thrive and to really succeed in reproduction and communication and their social activities. So I think we have a real benefit with underwater sound and being able to translate what we’re learning and why it’s important to people. So I love that.

Laurel
Switching gears, how did you develop interest in this field, whether it be marine science or just soundscaping? What was your pathway that you traversed from point A all the way to today?

Lindsey
How much time do we have? [laughter] When I was in school, one of my basketball coaches was a science teacher. And she was one of my mentors. She suggested that I do some science camps over the summer. I was mostly doing sports camps. I was like, oh, that sounds fun, I’ll do something a little different. So she’s really the one who got me into this Marine Science Camp in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. It’s called Science at Sea. You might be familiar with this organization, because now they’ve grown and they do college programs, and experiential learning programs, which was sort of my first experience doing that hands-on type of learning. I spent 10 days on the campus and then we spent 10 days on a schooner, a type of sailboat, putting everything that we had just learned in the classroom into practice. And so that was my first really like, Aha moment. There was a female oceanographer who was leading that part of our program, her name was Cheryl Peach. I’ll never forget her because I was always like, wait, you can get paid to explore the ocean and learn new things and go places people have never been before, and pull things up out of the ocean and just see what’s under there? It was just so like, Well, I want to do this, of course I want to do this. It was really empowering for me to see this professor being the person in charge on this boat and everyone following her lead. And so I was just like, I want to do that. This sounds cool. So that was my first time that I fell in love with marine science as a career. I really never lost that love for the whole science of the ocean and exploration. And so I pursued that in college.

After school, I moved to California. I didn’t know anybody, didn’t have a job at the time, but I moved to San Diego. I thought I wanted to pursue marine conservation but I wasn’t sure. Got some really awesome experience working in grassroots conservation, Community Conservation, and met some amazing people, from fishermen to community members to these amazing marine conservationists that are traveling the world. And that’s when I first started working with the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration. From then I went to Duke University and studied coastal environmental management. And that’s actually where I first started learning about bioacoustics. I got to jump on some Antarctic research programs where they were going down for two months at a time on these research vessels, and I was brought on to the project because I had spent so much time at sea at that point. I had a lot of experience doing visual observations, being able to spot different types of wildlife, whether turtles, birds, mammals, and then identify them. And that’s just one way that you can start doing population assessments. That’s why I was brought onto the project, but once I was there I was just a sponge and wanted to do everything. I started working with some of my colleagues on that project who were in bioacoustics. And so I really just dove headfirst and learned the ropes from them, and then just kind of fell in love with bioacoustics as well.

Laurel
Thank you so much. That was such a whirlwind but I really appreciate- you really trace this through everything and I think you were also able to do such a really cool project like Antarctica. That’s crazy! Segueing more into SanctSound as a project now, firstly I was wondering if you could summarize things in a few sentences to a layperson, and then also what would be your big take home message, or what is this driving significance of the project?

Lindsey
So SanctSound began in 2017, but we didn’t start actually putting sound recorders underwater until 2018 and 2019 in our sanctuary system in the United States. What the project aims to do is to monitor in as many locations as we can. In our case, we were able to monitor in 30 different stationary monitoring locations across the sanctuary system. So in US waters and territories, trying to establish baseline understanding of underwater soundscapes. We’re looking at the holistic soundscape, so all of these sounds that are happening at the same time. In our case, since we’re listening in 30 stationary locations, we want to establish baseline understanding in those locations. What’s the average sound levels? How noisy or quiet? Is it usually in the fall, in the spring, in the summer, in the winter? And what are the specific noise inputs that are common there? So maybe it’s common to have lots of biophysical sounds, lots of storms passing through, or different tidal flows, things like that. We want to understand the biologics that are normally there. And in some cases we have different animals that are migratory, so they might be present during some parts of the year and not during others. We want to understand what are those typical patterns of biological activity that we can record with our underwater microphones called hydrophones.

We are also at the same time recording temperature. So we are trying to understand the environmental conditions as well. And then again, we’re trying to understand what are the human inputs of sound? Because we want to have an understanding of, okay, what’s the current level of what we might consider noise pollution, what’s the current vessel activity, and some of our monitoring sites, they’re very near ports and busy harbors. And so we would expect to have the steady stream of vessel activity that we can record. We can also monitor vessels in other ways too, so we can integrate all of these different types of data that are coming in. And then we want to also understand more of the transient sounds, things that are only happening periodically, like maybe military testing that’s happening underwater. That’s the holistic sampling that we’re doing with SanctSound, and we’re trying to establish those baselines. So across a three year period in this case, we want to understand what is the typical or the average soundscape in these locations, particularly so we can understand disturbance, so if there’s an event that happens that would disrupt that average soundscape, we want to be able to understand that. 

I’ll give you a great example that everyone will be able to relate to, and that’s the COVID 19 pandemic. You know, COVID affected literally everything in our lives, but especially ship traffic. It rocked the international economy and it really influenced how goods were being moved by ships across these large waterways. We had an acoustic signature of that disruption in our records. We were able to record the reduction in noise input from vessels at these locations that typically would have the higher inputs of the vessel traffic noise.

Laurel
I think the example that you gave with COVID-19, I guess I learned today that COVID-19 did impact us, but also in another way towards sea life, ocean life. So that was super cool. I actually didn’t think of that being such an impactful use case, all of these soundscaping applications.

Lindsey
Yeah, COVID was quite a bummer for humans, but marine life has gotten a little reprieve. They’ve gotten a reprieve from the noise pollution.

Laurel
Yeah, for sure. Based on your experience with working in this field, or just in ocean science in general, what do you think really propels innovation in this field?

Lindsey
I think that it’s just- we have a lot of problems that we have to solve, and I think some of the problems are really big. It really requires a lot of creative and talented and smart people to come together to think outside of the box to come up with innovative ways to approach problems. We have a lot of what you would call “wicked problems” that don’t seem like they have a straightforward solution, or even any solution at all. But there really are ways to get win-win solutions. You know, maybe It’s not going to be one part of the puzzle is winning the whole game, it’s gonna be like a complete success story, but there’s ways that we can improve livelihoods and conservation status of species and people’s connection with the ocean, the climate situation, there’s ways that we can improve all of these things at the same time. That I think is what really inspires innovation, because it is a necessity. Yeah, we’d need to think outside of the box and approach things from a different angle.

Laurel
Absolutely. And I’m hoping that my generation hopefully has some good ideas in regards to all those issues, or the wicked issues, too, that you’ve mentioned. So I have lots of hope.

Lindsey
That innovation stuff we just talked about is what gives me a lot of hope, because I think we do have so many tools now that we can draw from to come up with those solutions to these wicked problems. I think that putting a lot of effort into sustainability is what really is interesting to me. So I do try to couch a lot of the things that I work on in my job, and in my role, into a larger vision of sustainability. And I know a lot of my peers do as well. So we are always on the same wavelength in that- but I’m always trying to think into the future, and how is this going to work towards this common sustainability goal that I think we have across sectors. Of course, economies want to be sustained just as much as we want to sustain ocean life and the health of our ecosystems. And so we have commonalities there. We have common ground. That’s been really motivating for me. Just always want to be working towards making things better for the next generation.

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Laurel
Talking with Lindsey, I realized how far her work reached, from the Channel Islands in Santa Barbara, California, to the sanctuaries all along the Pacific West Coast, stretching even up to Canada. I was amazed to hear that ocean fieldwork amassed large amounts of data that were open access, which is hard to find these days. When Lindsey told me about how holistic soundscape monitoring was, from “snapping shrimp,” to biophysical sounds like wind and waves, tides and currents, to even sounds of human vessel activity, I became inspired by how applicable all this data is to humans. I also found it quite interesting that the COVID-19 pandemic even impacted the ocean, due to lower ship traffic, generating acoustic signatures for future soundscapers. As Lindsey mentioned, “we use sound,” and it’s “very relatable to people.” Harnessing technology to be able to translate underwater sound to the public, makes me hopeful that we can pay it forward for the next generation of explorers!

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript.  Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

Jesse Annan van der Meulen
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Jesse Annan van der Meulen, Longitude fellow from Rice University.

Welcome to our Longitudes of Imagination series, where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that is helping advance understanding in ocean science and space technology!

In this series, we spoke with the members of the SanctSound project that is managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Navy. It is a project to better understand underwater sounds within the U.S. national marine sanctuaries.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with Dr. Leila Hatch, research ecologist at NOAA.

As a fellow, I was especially interested to hear about how we are only on the verge of recording and understanding underwater soundscapes, and how much insight this is already bringing us into the world of animals below the sea as well as human impact on this soundscape. We started our conversation with a broader introduction to NOAA and how Dr. Hatch is positioned within this agency.

.

Leila Hatch

I work for the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is nicknamed NOAA. And in the United States, people tend to- like if I asked my neighbors what NOAA is, they say that’s where you get your National Weather Service data from. So every day when they look up whether it’s going to be cloudy, right, that’s how they think of NOAA. But of course, all the way through to if they live in a place where there’s a big hurricane, they think, who’s going to predict whether the storm is going to hit me, NOAA. And if they work offshore and they’re a fisherman, and they want to know if I go out today, am I going to get absolutely slammed by waves, they look at our oceanographic data and NOAA, right. So there is a- NOAA sits in our Department of Commerce which, once we start talking about all these more environmentally focused things—that is what I do—will start to be kind of questionable. Our National Parks Service is in the Department of the Interior. We do all kinds of protection of animals that are in these wildlife spaces, that’s all over in our Department of the Interior. And so folks think, well, logically all the stuff you do to protect sea animals, that should be over there too. But no, it’s in Department of Commerce. And that’s because it emerged initially from being the place that managed fisheries. And that was a business, right? That is commerce.

Inside NOAA, we have what’s called the wet side and the dry side. The dry side we consider to be all our weather services and satellites, and all of that information I talked about that’s associated with predicting climate, which is huge right now. And predicting and helping people with information about the environment, they need to make decisions. And then the wet side involves managing endangered species that live in the ocean, managing all the fisheries and making sure that those are sustainable. And then I work for the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, which is the analogous part that protects the places in the country that have been designated as special to protect everything that lives there.

Jesse
It’s a great explanation. How did you become involved in the SanctSound project specifically, and what is your role in it, and also more broadly, in NOAA?

Leila
I have been studying the effects of underwater sound—sound that is produced by people and the things we do offshore, and the effects that has on marine life—through my doctoral work and then on into my career. NOAA does not have responsibilities to reduce noise, just to go out there and control human sources of noise. I work in the parts of the agency that focus on the spaces, the places that are important to animals and marine life. So what I do for NOAA at an agency level, I partner with a few colleagues and we manage what’s called our agency level NOAA ocean noise strategy, which we developed and published in 2006, which is a way of wrapping our arms around the very many authorities we have across fisheries and areas and habitats and species. And collectively we’re seeking to reduce the effects of underwater noise on those species.

We have a very sort of synthetic science plan that underlies that, that is to better understand how animals are using sound to begin with, because the more we understand all of those uses, the better we can get at what it is animals need us to mitigate or reduce that is harmful. And we have a very broad monitoring strategy, which is to push us beyond monitoring this place in this way and then over here in this place, and this way. Some of which is sometimes needed, if you’re gonna build a wind farm right over there, or whatever it is, but broadly at its core, NOAA over decades needed a way of monitoring the way noise actually behaves, which is very large scale. So we produced a science plan that has this array of sensors underwater that are monitoring for a very long time. And we argued at the time that we put together the strategy that really sanctuaries should even have a finer resolution information that goes on. Again, this is long term monitoring that is focused in sanctuaries, and is underscoring how important the sound is to animals from a really wide range of taxonomic groups in these places. So we made that recommendation in 2016. That project was then funded in collaboration with the US Navy and myself, and the US Navy led from then on the sanctuary soundscape monitoring project. And that project is nicknamed SanctSound. It went from 2017 to this past spring, just about a month ago, when we finally pushed those products out.

Jesse
Wow. So just you basically just finished up with the project.

Leila
We did. It was a time-limited project. And our goal now is to definitely not stop, there’s still going to be monitoring going forward and in this national coordinated way.

Jesse
Okay. You have a ton of data to look at, analyze and…

Leila
300 terabytes.

Jesse
Wow, it’s hard to imagine how much that is.

Leila
Yeah, I tried to figure this out. You can fit 50 High Definition movies in one terabyte. So this is 300 terabytes. A very, very large part of this project was figuring that out. It was a really big push to just coordinate a data collection approach. But in terms of innovation, which is data management, how to get all of that data in one place in a way that you could compare it, and it would be there and anyone can download it and all of that.

Jesse
Okay. So you’ve briefly mentioned already that sound pollution is harmful to animals. Could you give a specific example of ways in which sound can harm animals in the sea?

Leila
The project underscored that there are several ways that recording underwater helps you better protect animals. And one of the really big ones is it helps you understand the interaction between humans sources of noise and the sound that animals need. We have several stories that we wrote, first of all little web stories that are all correlated on the portal that get into these different kinds of effects. 

Leila
I’ll give you an example off the coast of Massachusetts, here in the Northeast, in a place where a lot of low frequency animals use sound, predictably, during really important life functions every year. There are several stocks of endangered baleen whales that come here, and white whales, for example, there’s around 300 animals left. Every spring during their foraging time they often have their young with them. And they use their calls in order to keep a connection between mothers and calves. When the background noise gets increased by a lot of vessel presence, which we have in Stellwagen Bank, the radius, the distances over which they’re able to hear one another, are decreased. So inside the bay, you’ve made the hum a little bit louder for those animals that absolutely need to be here to feed on these copepod blooms that come in the spring, if you really think about what they are- the largest animals on earth feed on things that are some of the smallest on the planet in the ocean. So the only way that math works is that they evolved over a time period where those resources were predictably very high concentrations, and that they could basically hit a grocery store, right, that they knew where that grocery store was going to be, they could use the entire ocean basin as their place to look for grocery stores, but they needed to be able to find them. And they needed to be able to exploit them in a huge way in order to get the fat resources that they would need for the fasting periods that take place and the other parts of their life history. So all of that means that the magic of whales that migrate at those scales are the ability to find those resources. And if they start to become less predictable due to the effects of climate, the ability to exchange information with each other about where they are over very large scales, and the ability to keep track of other members of their population in general over very large scales, the ability to navigate using cues about the underwater environment. All of those are hugely based on their use of sound.

Jesse
I see. So for them sound is really the most important sense they have, is what it sounds like from what you’re saying. You know sight, I think, is the most important for us, but it’s not like that for animals in the ocean, that sounds like it …

Leila
That’s exactly right. And it’s a scale thing. So not only does the sound travel four times faster underwater than it does in air, so it’s more efficient as a means of communicating over very large scales. What’s very difficult about the doing this impact work is that we can theoretically assess the distance over which animals can project a signal under different noise conditions, but we can’t prove often that those full extents, those signals were always being used. We just know that we are encroaching on those full extents significantly, really reducing them in large steps. But it’s to do the science to really be able to prove that blue whale A is talking to Blue Whale B in a way that is providing information that is helping them make their living in the ocean. That’s tricky stuff. So we are often left with documenting the loss at scales that we know are relevant to the population, but that’s one of our trickier bits. Because there’s still a lot of magic to how whales show up where they need to show up to exploit these resources.

Jesse
So there are still many unknowns as well. Now you said that you’re an evolutionary biologist by training, how did you even get into this field? It’s a pretty specific field of study.

Leila
Very specific field of study. I think one of the easier things is easier parts of it, because I come from a landlocked, small town. I grew up in a rural place, and very active outdoors, very interested in animals, and on a farm and with a lot of animals. And that got combined with- my father is a musicologist. I loved music and hearing, always. And then it was a college town. A man moved there to work at the Cornell laboratory of Ornithology, which, that’s birds. However, he was supposed to run the bioacoustics research program. And that program became a place that I got really interested in working in in high school, and that I worked on for a long time, went away and did college, and then came back and did my PhD work as part of that bioacoustics research program, but also part of the broader university’s evolutionary biology program, because specifically I was interested in, can we use sound to track how whole populations of animals are related to one another, across the entire northern hemisphere? And if we know better how they’re related to another we’ll do a much better job managing them. At that time I was working on whales, and the International Whaling Commission is where they have to make decisions about how many of these animals are there in different groups over huge scales? And how are they related to one another? And what happens if you know we need to have a whale hunt over here? Is it really going to affect just this little population, because they’re sort of one thing to themselves, or are they interbreeding with this huge group over here? I was interested in how acoustics could give us a signature of that. That was also because I got really interested in policy and how we make decisions about the environment. I then left and worked in Washington DC in our Congress at the House of Representatives through a fellowship program. And then after that, I wanted to do this work working for government.

Jesse
It’s always so surprising what people end up doing. Would you have thought you’d be doing something like you do today maybe 30 years ago?

Leila
Yeah, you know, I mentor and talk to a lot of people now who are developing their careers and I honestly think mine is problematically linear. You know, for the oddness of what I do, I think it’s actually hard sometimes when I’m talking to people to answer that question, which is, yes, 30 years ago, I knew exactly what I would be doing. It looked like this, which is weird, right? I think a lot of people who I work with now have- because I now have a very broad portfolio actually, in terms of how I apply what I do. I work on how- where should we go with wind farms, or I work on, you know, is there something we could be doing on the vessel space? Can we work internationally better, and vessel noise control, making them quieter? So the day to day work I do right now is very general. But if you look at the path, it all does sort of go in a line, there’s not a whole lot of tangents. I think many people’s careers have lots of tangents. And they’re interesting, right?

Jesse
It is beautiful to hear examples of paths that are a bit more linear even though they are so… it’s such a special path that you took.

Leila
Thank you. You’re right. There’s a lot of luck that goes into linearity. But there’s also a lot of luck that goes into looking back and realize the path wasn’t clear, but you’re interested in where you got.

Jesse
Yeah, I’d also love to ask you if you have any visions for the future of the SanctSound project, or underwater sound research in general?

Leila
Oh, yes, I do. And it’s wonderful because when we started this project, again, it was a recommendation to go really deeply into what sanctuaries could mean for the next frontier. People should be able to go to their sanctuaries, listen to these places, download the information. The idea that we could really be a portal to people’s understanding of these places, either just from their experience or all the way to the science. That was that initial conception of access. Another way of understanding the beauty of these places and becoming more deeply invested in them.

Four years later, the program has had to marry that to all the other priorities of holding on to these places. And they had never had a standardized monitoring system. Period. Of anything. Taking on in the last year to consider what a transition will look like and to support it as much as we can. So I’m really pleased, I think we really do have a commitment to gather this information on a lot of our places and start to consider how it allows us to answer system-wide questions as well as being able to compare things apples to apples, so that you might say, if I have limited resources, where’s my threat the greatest? Or where’s the feasibility of an effect that I could have the greatest, and just trying to make those allocation decisions linked to a more comparable resource? So those are some of my dreams, keeping it going.

For me, my visions always are, how can we really affect human behavior? It’s such a funny thing to be an ecologist. But really, when you’re an ecologist, if you really are a conservation biologist, ultimately you’re an anthropologist more than anything else, because the effect we’re looking to have is on people and how they behave. For me, the next frontier will be continuing to work on the quieting front, and to embed it in emission control in general.

Jesse
So are you going to continue to work with certain partners, because I know that SanctSound- I read that they had quite a few partners listed as well in the project. Are they are very important?

Leila
They’re hugely important. To a certain degree, the list of partners we had in SanctSound, although it does include my colleagues at the US Navy, for example, the vast majority of them were partners in this: get the data out of the water all the way through the pipeline, get the data to people and analyze it along the way. So a lot of folks in the academic and data management space. Those will continue to be essential partners in the question asking and essential partners in data collection. But there’s a whole other suite of partners that are in place now but are likely to keep growing, that are in the other agencies and industry space, and other stakeholders who are non academic but who have a very clear vision for how the ocean should look in the future, as well as those who are not industrial but who are protective. So it’s those partnerships that are likely to be the ones that grow.

Jesse
So, I did prepare a little rapid fire five questions. They’re very easy, they’re not so serious.

Leila
Rapid fire means I have to keep myself short? I can do that.

Jesse
Yeah. What is your favorite marine animal?

Leila
Wales.

Jesse
What’s your favorite underwater sound?

Leila
Bearded seals.

Jesse
Bearded seals? Oh…what kind of sounds do they make?

Leila
Have you seen Star Wars? They used a lot of bearded seal sounds in Star Wars.

[sounds of bearded seals]

Jesse
Cool! What’s your least favorite underwater sound?

Leila
Probably air guns. I’m really not a fan of air guns.

Jesse
Makes sense. What’s your favorite ocean themed movie?

Leila
Finding Nemo? I have little kids. Oh, the octopus movie that just came out in the last couple of years. I am supposed to say Sonic Sea because I’m in it. I’ll say Sonic Sea too just so NRDC doesn’t get mad.

Jesse
Ok. Cool. Wow, you did a great job with the rapid fire.

Leila
I tried. I tried.

.

Jesse
So first of all, I’d like to thank Dr. Hatch for the insights she shared with us today. And after listening to her, I just felt inspired to tell a short story of my own that feels connected to this. Last summer, I was able to go to French Polynesia to do research in the fields of marine biology and ecology. And I experienced myself how many interesting things are happening in the ocean that we would never think of. There’s just so many intricacies going on, for example, the topic that I studied with Dr. Carsten Grupstra is the impact of feces of fish that live on coral reefs on coral reef health. And as many people pointed out to me when I told them about what I was doing, this is kind of a weird topic and you might think, oh, do we need to study this? Or is this important? And actually, we’re finding out that things like this, such weird and interesting things that are going on in the ocean and such weird interactions, can actually help us understand what’s going on underwater so much better. And the SanctSound project that Dr. Hatch was such a key player in, has also opened up so many new visions on the understanding of how animals communicate underwater, what kind of sounds we’re noticing underwater. It opened up a whole new world of understanding, really. And not only is this going to be able to help us better understand animals that live underwater, but it’s also going to help us understand how to better protect them. Sometimes we even learn things about humanity. So I just think that it’s really amazing how a project like this can lead to so many new insights on so many new areas. And I want to thank Dr. Hatch for doing the work that she does.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Jacqueline Buskop
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.  

For our new series prepare to dive in the ocean with us! We are continuing our Longitudes of Imagination conversations, and this time we are exploring underwater sound monitoring at the U.S. National Marine Sanctuaries.

I am Jacqueline Buskop, Longitude fellow and a recent graduate of Rice University with a masters in environmental analysis.

Alongside Longitude fellows Laurel Chen, Jesse van der Meulen, Melisa Acimis and Tony Zhou, we were thrilled to interview Lindsey Peavey Reeves, Leila Hatch, John Ryan, Samara Haver, and Eden Zang from the SanctSound project.  

Are you ready for a sneak peek of the upcoming episodes?  Leila Hatch, the project leader at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Lindsey Peavey Reeves, soundscape monitoring coordinator for the west coast marine sanctuaries, start with an introduction to how SanctSound project originated.

Leila Hatch
Broadly at its core, NOAA over decades, needed a way of monitoring the way noise actually behaves, which is very large scale. So we produced a science plan that has this array of sensors underwater that are monitoring for a very long time. And we argued at the time that we put together the strategy that really sanctuary should even have a finer resolution information that goes on, again, is long term monitoring that is focused in sanctuaries, and is underscoring how important the sound is to animals from a really wide range of taxonomic groups in these places. So we made that recommendation and in 2016, that project was then funded in collaboration with the US Navy and myself and the US Navy led from then on the sanctuary soundscape monitoring project. And that project is nicknamed SanctSound.

Lindsey Peavey Reeves
So SanctSound began in 2017 but we didn’t start actually putting sound recorders underwater until 2018 and 2019 in our sanctuary system in the United States. What the project aims to do is to monitor in as many locations as we can. And so in our case, we were able to monitor in 30 different stationary monitoring locations across the sanctuary system in US waters and territories, trying to establish baseline understanding of underwater soundscapes. We’re looking at the holistic soundscape. So all of the sounds that are happening at the same time.

Jacqueline
What are all the sounds in the ocean, you may wonder. Samara Haver, a postdoctoral scholar at the Pacific Marine Environmental Lab speaks about them.

Samara Haver
Soundscapes are sounds from animals themselves and fish and shrimp, any biological creatures. And then there’s also sounds from the environment like wind and rain and ice, volcanoes, and then sounds from humans from cargo vessels from cruise ships from sonar, seismic air guns, anything that humans are doing that’s, that’s adding sound into an environment. And so because a lot of marine animals rely exclusively on sound, to communicate, to find food, to navigate, avoid predators, because the ocean is so dark and washes away scent, really sound is what these animals evolved to rely on. So when it’s too noisy from other sound sources, then it becomes a conservation issue for these animals because they’re not able to, to basically live out their life history and survive.

Jacqueline
Turns out, the nature of sound under water is much different than in the air. In one study it has been noted that sounds that originated at the Antarctic were heard all the way in the Bermudas!

John Ryan from Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute speaks to Melisa about the role of sound in ocean life.

John Ryan
The importance of understanding ocean sound is that the ocean is a world of sound. It is a strange world to us, but one in which sound travels very powerfully, and travels far and it travels fast. And what that means is, ocean life has evolved to use sound in so many ways. So just by listening, we can learn so much about ocean life, about their life activities, communication, navigation, foraging, socialization, reproduction, we can hear it, it also means that we have to be careful about the noise we introduce to the ocean, because it can cause harm.

Melisa Acimis
Could you elaborate on the effects of sound in the ocean on mammals?

John Ryan
There are really four ways that our noise can have a negative impact on ocean animals. The first is interference with communication. It’s called masking. It’s like if you and I were trying to have this conversation, and someone was operating a jackhammer next to my chair, it would be really difficult for us to have that conversation and that in many cases, we are preventing them from communicating with one another. A second way, a second harmful effect of our noise is a behavioral disturbance like we can cause a population to move away from a source of noise, when in fact that population needs to be there in order to survive because their food resource is there. So we can cause them to be malnourished, for example. And then a third way that we can have a negative effect is to cause acute or chronic stress.

Jacqueline
Having just completed my environmental analysis studies at Rice, I was curious about what the Marine Sanctuaries had to offer in expanding our understanding of the soundscapes and how the recordings at each sanctuary differed. I spoke to Eden Zang from the Hawaiian Islands and then Lindsey expanded on the network they built.

Eden Zang
The Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, has sanctuaries all over the US from Florida all the way to American Samoa, we fall right in the middle of the Pacific. So we’re like underwater national parks, and at the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale Sanctuary, we are a single species sanctuary, which is unique, that we focus on the humpback whale and their habitat here in the Hawaiian Islands. This project focused on understanding and characterizing the soundscapes, which is basically you know, every sound that is kind of in an environment, but categorizing this so that we have these baseline understandings of what’s going on in our sanctuaries.

Lindsey Peavey Reeves
We work with a really large network of partners to accomplish this, because it’s a really large undertaking, so it’s hard for us to do it solely as one organization. So we work across a lot of different organizations. We had over 50 individuals that were a part of the projects, over 20 different organizations. So that’s kind of the magnitude when I’m talking about partnerships. It’s quite large, both on the coming up with the resources to make it happen, but also the implementation of it as well. And then I also work with a team of analysts that are also scattered all around the west coast and even beyond that, that are really focused on working with the data once it comes out of the water.

Jacqueline
The SanctSound project gathered 300 tetrabytes of data from almost 4 years of recording. As Eden shares, collecting the data was only the first phase of the action plan.

Eden Zang
So SanctSound, one of the big priorities for that was to create and you know, a repository for all of this data. Now that we have wrapped up this four years of data collection, anybody in the public can go to our website and look, and if they’re interested in particular sounds in their area, different data products, they can really go in there and delve in and explore what we discovered. So moving forward, we do want to continue some of that effort, and will continue to archive our data nationally, and so that it is publicly accessible to other scientists, members of the public, whoever wants to access it. So you know, not only was it interesting for us, and we had a purpose of characterizing the soundscapes in these regions, but we also want to make sure that it’s publicly accessible, and so that it’s out there for everyone to use.

Jacqueline
Accessibility of the data to the public makes this project even more interesting. John speaks about the role of imagination when studying the life of marine species, and also when trying to make sense of the data.

John Ryan
…imagination immediately comes in when you enter the world of data. It takes a lot of imagination to apply analytical tools to a mountain of data and to come out with understanding. I guess what I’d say is that we are never just working with sound data. We get other types of information from satellites that orbit the Earth and look down at the environment and tell us how is it changing from year to year, from day to day? And how did the animals respond to that?

And then I think very briefly, that it takes a lot of imagination to translate from the language of science into the language that everyone understands. Science is full of its terminology and its complexities. But your job when you are taking that information into education, is to use your imagination to create communication that people not only understand, but in a way that allows them to connect with ocean life.

Jacqueline
What is the hope for the future from the soundscape research? Tony and Samara speak about it.

Tony Zhou
Let’s say you get the data, you’ve analyzed it, what are some conclusions or maybe solutions, that maybe that’s a better word. What are some solutions that you’ve and your team, and maybe people in this field have come up with to reduce the noise because I don’t think vessels are going anywhere anytime soon. Like, I think they’re probably just gonna, you know, be in the ocean. And it seems like with ocean research, and the way that the world wants to expand cities, there’s probably going to be more things put into the water. So what are some solutions for how to like, declutter and remove this noise?

Samara Haver
First of all, you are exactly right. Ships are getting bigger and faster and we know that bigger and faster ships are noisier. So sound levels from vessels are increasing. And then we also know that animals are impacted by this. And so trying to figure out how to do something about it. Some of the projects that I’m working on are with national marine sanctuaries, and also with the National Park Service’s are interested in what kind of management actions might be appropriate for animal conservation. So like you said, vessels aren’t going away. But managers do have some tools like a voluntary vessel slowdowns, during certain times of the year when we know that sensitive species are present, or monitoring particular areas during certain times of the year.

Tony Zhou
But what is the ideal hope that these experiments kind of lead to eventually?

Samara Haver
… the cool thing about sound and ocean noise, as some people would describe it is that it’s not like other types of pollution. You know, if you just stop the sound source, it just goes away. There’s no cleanup, obviously, harm can be done. But it’s not like an oil spill where it can take, you know, decades to clean up the sound, it’s just this energy just dissipates. So a lot of focus on mitigating sound is looking at vessel technologies, how to make vessels quieter, and what needs to be done to potentially retrofit older vessels and designing newer vessels that are quieter and then looking at where vessels are moving in the ocean, or their particular shipping lanes or routes that intersect with important habitats for endangered or threatened species.

Jacqueline
Discovering the variety of sounds in the ocean and listening to them through the SanctSound portal has been an eye opener for all of us.  You can find the link (https://sanctsound.ioos.us) for it on our show notes and on Longitude.site.

Join us for the upcoming episodes to hear more about SanctSound and the roles of individuals who are turning ideas into action.

You can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Subscribe to Longitude Sound Bytes on your podcast platform to make sure you don’t miss the stories and experiences we’ve prepared. You can also visit our website at Longitude.Site, for more information and content.