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.

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