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.