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.