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Speaker 4: Oh hey, we just won the twenty twenty two Webby
Speaker 4: Award for Best Host, which is a weird thing to
Speaker 4: say as the host of this podcast, especially since I'm
Speaker 4: recording this in my sister's garage. So who says you
Speaker 4: have to be professional to win things? Hi, it's Ali Ward.
Speaker 4: It's your Internet dad back with a fresh episode crafted
Speaker 4: for you just this week. So acoustic ecology, what the
Speaker 4: heck is it? So it's what sounds in nature tell
Speaker 4: us about who's living where. This whole episode is just
Speaker 4: like a nature app but with much more gossip. And
Speaker 4: we've got one of the world's best for this. So
Speaker 4: this ologist got his PhD in marine science from the
Speaker 4: University of Queensland and has worked in conservation in over
Speaker 4: twenty countries, from snow leopard tracking at Mongolia to big
Speaker 4: grass munchers and Kenya and tiny bugs in Borneo. And
Speaker 4: he's co authored tons of research papers plus a book
Speaker 4: called Conservation Planning, and is currently the lead scientist and
Speaker 4: Director of Conservation for the Nature Conservancies Asia Pacific Region
Speaker 4: and has been given all kinds of awards for using
Speaker 4: technology and bioacoustics to help save our flaming, gasping, burning
Speaker 4: acid bath planet. Today we have this episode for you.
Speaker 4: So it was a recent scorching hot afternoon in La
Speaker 4: We hopped on the horn and I thought, man, this
Speaker 4: is going to be the easiest thing ever a remote
Speaker 4: interview the mic guy no tech challenges here, but alas
Speaker 4: for some reason his mic was faltering and was super quiet.
Speaker 4: Can you even believe I can't, but Jarrett sprust it
Speaker 4: up and post we boosted his sound, so what it's
Speaker 4: worth a listen anyway? All the other episodes have better sound. Okay,
Speaker 4: real quick, just to thanks to everyone who submitted questions
Speaker 4: via patreon dot com slash ologies barrier to entry is
Speaker 4: one dollar a month hop aboard. Thanks to everyone who
Speaker 4: tells friends about ologies, who leaves a review knowing that
Speaker 4: I read them all, such as one that Emily left
Speaker 4: a few days ago that read, I gotta say, lady,
Speaker 4: I hated science before I listened to your podcast. Now
Speaker 4: I can't get enough. Emily welcomed the messy, weird world
Speaker 4: of nature. Let's get gross, okay, so let's get on
Speaker 4: with it. We cover everything from how noisy the ocean
Speaker 4: is capturing sonic evidence of rare animals, who's the loudest
Speaker 4: bird and what do they want? How fish apartment hunt,
Speaker 4: ghosts and infrasound, how much logging is illegal logging, the
Speaker 4: types of jobs out there for sound nerds who like science,
Speaker 4: and a weird thing that I have in my backyard
Speaker 4: with acoustic ecologist doctor Eddie Game. Hi, is this doctor game? Uh? Okay?
Speaker 4: Doctor game sounds like a sounds like a deal. Oh,
Speaker 4: and one thing I will have you do at the
Speaker 4: start if you could say your first and last name
Speaker 4: and your pronouns that you use.
Speaker 3: Yeah, eddie, game, Yeah?
Speaker 4: And where am I talking to you from? Where are
Speaker 4: you beaming in from?
Speaker 3: I'm talking for Brisbane, Australia.
Speaker 4: Oh, I hope that it is a reasonable time there.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, it's it's quarter past nine in the morning,
Speaker 5: so it's halfway through my webday pretty much.
Speaker 4: Do you have to get up early early for what
Speaker 4: you do?
Speaker 3: Do you know what?
Speaker 5: I get up early because I am so often connecting
Speaker 5: with people in the US.
Speaker 3: That's the bulk of our organization is in the US.
Speaker 4: And now you've been working with Nature Conservancy, right, how
Speaker 4: long have you been with them?
Speaker 3: Oh? Goodness, fourteen and a half years. It's a long time.
Speaker 4: And I have to ask acoustic ecology. I did not
Speaker 4: know that this was an ology, but what areas does
Speaker 4: monitoring or listening work in? Like? How do you describe
Speaker 4: what acoustic ecology is to people?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 3: It's so cool? Do you know? And I don't think
Speaker 3: many people knew it was an ology too.
Speaker 5: Apparently five or six years ago and really started taking
Speaker 5: sort of whiskers of it, and there's some people in California.
Speaker 3: It's Goodlin Italy doing it. But now you know.
Speaker 5: It's it's sort of exploding such that I think it's
Speaker 5: going to be impossible to do even a basic ecology
Speaker 5: degree in a few years time without learning something about
Speaker 5: acoustic ecology. And so I definitely put it firmly in
Speaker 5: that ecology basket. I think of it as one of
Speaker 5: the great new streams of data. When we first started
Speaker 5: getting satellite images of Earth, it's completely transformational in the
Speaker 5: sort of science we could do and the insights we
Speaker 5: could get into the planet.
Speaker 4: If you're like, was that in nineteen ninety two or
Speaker 4: eighteen seventy four, I gotcha. So the first images humans
Speaker 4: took from space were by the US in the mid
Speaker 4: nineteen forties, so see right after the Second World War.
Speaker 4: And it's gotten better since those base blurs. But in
Speaker 4: nineteen ninety nine the US and Japan launched a group
Speaker 4: project which was public domain images via the Aster Imaging System.
Speaker 4: And the point is like a rocket with an instematic
Speaker 4: strap to the front of it, things move fast. Is
Speaker 4: some of that rise in acoustic ecology because of just
Speaker 4: technology getting faster and cheaper.
Speaker 3: Yes, definitely cheaper.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 5: I think that that has been a real game changer
Speaker 5: for how the sort of questions you can ask with
Speaker 5: acoustic ecology, because it used to be sort of thing
Speaker 5: you need to pay thousands, thousands of dollars to get
Speaker 5: a decent microphone. And people realize two things. One is
Speaker 5: that you can do a lot with cheaper microphones, and
Speaker 5: also good quality microphones are getting much cheaper, and companies
Speaker 5: started to make good sort of field for purpose things.
Speaker 5: And because people were able to put down more microphones
Speaker 5: really mean second seat of start asking different questions that
Speaker 5: wasn't possible in the part. So yeah, and the processing
Speaker 5: I think has changed a bit too, But I don't
Speaker 5: think that was ever really that limited. What really happened
Speaker 5: was he started having computer scientists being willing to engage
Speaker 5: on this as a topic. But once we started getting
Speaker 5: the computing science engineers involved, that.
Speaker 3: Really helped too.
Speaker 4: Just a sad note, So that programming language you mentioned
Speaker 4: is called R and I was not familiar with it
Speaker 4: and I went to google it and it's just it's
Speaker 4: like an app that left out all the vowels and
Speaker 4: most of the consonants. It's just r but it says
Speaker 4: it's an integrated suite of software facilities for data manipulation, calculation,
Speaker 4: and graphical display. And it's free. That's the important part.
Speaker 4: Anyone can use it to go get it, you dirty
Speaker 4: little nerds. And what about you? Were you an ecollogists
Speaker 4: first who learned to us acoustic equipment or did you
Speaker 4: always have an ear for music and sound and kind
Speaker 4: of blended them together.
Speaker 3: No, definitely, definitely the ecologistry.
Speaker 5: I was a marine ecologist originally marine violentist and lived
Speaker 5: in fisheries and then came did all sorts of things
Speaker 5: at the Nature.
Speaker 3: Conserve and see and I was editor of a journal.
Speaker 5: And I started seeing manuscripts and research coming out a
Speaker 5: little bits of it on acoustic ecology, and I realized quietly,
Speaker 5: I was like, Wow, this could help solve a problem
Speaker 5: we have, particularly in Papu, New Guinea, for.
Speaker 3: Surveying in these rainforests.
Speaker 5: But it's really hard for people to know what's happening
Speaker 5: there because it's hard to find experts to know what
Speaker 5: they're talking about. Me that a lot of about traditional survey
Speaker 5: emit this wouldn't work, And so that's what God interested
Speaker 5: in it. But I don't have much of an affinity
Speaker 5: for sound. Actually, I was a terrible musician as a child.
Speaker 5: I love listening to music, but I think my passion
Speaker 5: for listening to music actually damaged my hearing. I spent
Speaker 5: so long, it's every university days at concerts, and I'm sure,
Speaker 5: I'm sure there's no value of me buying an expensive
Speaker 5: stereo anymore. It's not through any kind of musicality of
Speaker 5: my own that I got involved in.
Speaker 4: You mentioned that you were a marine scientist too, like
Speaker 4: does acoustic ecology work obviously terrestrial and oceanic applications, But
Speaker 4: how different it is the equipment.
Speaker 3: Oh good Christ, really different.
Speaker 5: But the marine side of things actually was where acoustic
Speaker 5: ecology recided for many years. Acoustic ecology people associated for
Speaker 5: me in decades, even with listening to whales and dolphins,
Speaker 5: principally because that was a really good way to survey them.
Speaker 3: Put down these.
Speaker 4: Hydrophones, just a quick one. So a hydrophone is specifically
Speaker 4: designed to pick up underwater noise because sound travels four
Speaker 4: point three times faster in water than it doesn't air,
Speaker 4: and the pressure of a sound wave in water is
Speaker 4: sixty times that of air. What So like your fin footed,
Speaker 4: gill faced ancestors, the field of acoustic ecology kind of
Speaker 4: rose from these watery depths and then flopped itself onto
Speaker 4: land sound also as.
Speaker 5: It started to really expand in the sort of terrestrial
Speaker 5: of the land space. So when there went back to
Speaker 5: the freshwater and marine space into side're thinking, you know,
Speaker 5: the way that people are applying sound in the forests
Speaker 5: and woodlands and things like that, I wonder if we
Speaker 5: could do the same in the marine space. Thinking instead
Speaker 5: of about just looking for signatures of individual animals, could
Speaker 5: we tell something about all the overall sound that's.
Speaker 3: Happening and things are really seemed really promising.
Speaker 4: And you mentioned something about the signatures of of animals.
Speaker 4: What kinds of noises are you listening for? I mean,
Speaker 4: I know that we're all thinking like bird calls, yeah,
Speaker 4: maybe some bats high frequency, but like, what how do
Speaker 4: you how do you even figure out in a sound
Speaker 4: file who's singing?
Speaker 3: What? Oh, that's a great question.
Speaker 5: So this, first of all, there's lots of different animals
Speaker 5: that vocalize the biggest group of animals that you hear
Speaker 5: vocalizing when you make any recording it insects. Insects, insects
Speaker 5: vocalized at all sorts of different frequencies at all kinds
Speaker 5: of times of day, and that's something we can begin
Speaker 5: to done. Sometimes they're really sort of characteristic. Sometimes they're
Speaker 5: completely unknown. But then you also have amphibians from obviously
Speaker 5: mammals birds, that's it, because that's another good thing to mention,
Speaker 5: because bats were also one of those animals that people
Speaker 5: had continued to use acoustic ecology to survey just because
Speaker 5: I have the seabouts but actually had to hear them.
Speaker 5: But if you put out these sort of ultrasonic recorders
Speaker 5: that record a very high frequentlee, so you can you
Speaker 5: can hear, and there's a bit of separation between a
Speaker 5: lot of work on bats and a lot of the
Speaker 5: other things we hear in recordings.
Speaker 3: So if you have a microphone that's really good.
Speaker 5: For hearing that, it's not so good for capturing differences
Speaker 5: between most of the sounds that you and I hear
Speaker 5: with our ears.
Speaker 4: So human beings that's us can hear in the range
Speaker 4: of twenty hurts to twenty killer hurts, and bats are
Speaker 4: up there just cute in their little quts in the
Speaker 4: range of twelve killer hurts to one hundred and sixty
Speaker 4: killer hertz, that is one hundred and forty killer herds
Speaker 4: above our range of hearing. Their conversations go right over
Speaker 4: our heads in so many ways, which is why recordings
Speaker 4: of bat noises are usually dumb, so our ape, ears
Speaker 4: and brains can hear it. Do you want to hear
Speaker 4: something else? Can I tell you a secret? I have
Speaker 4: a bat microphone in my backyard. I was recently selected
Speaker 4: two months ago to have a bat survey from the
Speaker 4: natural in my yard, and fifteen minutes before this call,
Speaker 4: Miguel or Nana, who runs the survey, was coming and checking.
Speaker 4: We just got the survey back from last month. We
Speaker 4: have like three bats in our yard, three species that
Speaker 4: it's not like three individual bats who just hang out.
Speaker 4: They were looking for people, and I emailed them within
Speaker 4: a millisecond, please my backyard, please my guard. So they
Speaker 4: installed this tiny microphone and they come once a month
Speaker 4: to come and take the sound cards. And this makes
Speaker 4: me feel a lot better because there are so many
Speaker 4: times where I've been talking to my dog in a
Speaker 4: baby voice very high frequency, or singing to plants, being
Speaker 4: like can they pick this up? So they can't pick
Speaker 4: that up? Is what you're saying no.
Speaker 3: Not usually, so I mean you could, you might.
Speaker 5: The problem is that the frequency of their calls is
Speaker 5: so fast you have to have a microphone that can
Speaker 5: quite credibly fast to be able to capture that. And
Speaker 5: that means the sort of longer, slower sound ways and
Speaker 5: lower frequencies just tend.
Speaker 3: To get a bit blurry in there.
Speaker 5: Okay, so it's not really good for distinguishing between different
Speaker 5: frequencies for the lower in the ring.
Speaker 4: That makes me feel so much better. I mean, I
Speaker 4: was so excited because we already had an interview on
Speaker 4: the books I feel like for a while, and then
Speaker 4: this came up that we got selected to have about survey.
Speaker 4: So I was like, this is perfect, but can you
Speaker 4: tell me a little bit about what animals occupy what frequencies?
Speaker 4: I feel like it's got to just be all over
Speaker 4: the map.
Speaker 3: It is all lower than that, so you know, so
Speaker 3: where I guess most of the frequencies that we're listening to,
Speaker 3: like human hearing, can hear the best case scenario from
Speaker 3: twenty hurts up to twenty killer hurts, and that's actually
Speaker 3: the range that most animals vocalizing have. The very very
Speaker 3: kind of low end of that range, you.
Speaker 5: Do get some some amphibians down there, quite like called
Speaker 5: some mammals in and there are some birds in the
Speaker 5: jungles of how the new gin you have these amazing
Speaker 5: birds called cassiaries.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, kind of big prehistoric things for a little
Speaker 6: bit like dinosaurs, but they they vocalize very very low frequency,
Speaker 6: so sometimes hard to pick out those calls even on
Speaker 6: our microphones.
Speaker 5: As you move up a little bit, you get into
Speaker 5: sort of the I guess the frequencies that we hear
Speaker 5: the best at in those you know, around three killer herds,
Speaker 5: and that's that's really have a lot of birds in
Speaker 5: that space in jungles.
Speaker 3: Like those in Borneo.
Speaker 5: You get primates in that kind of space too, And
Speaker 5: then as you go up higher you can get birds
Speaker 5: out slightly higher frequencies, but you certainly get lot of
Speaker 5: insects at higher frequencies. There is even lots of insects
Speaker 5: vocalizing up ten killer hurtsten killers even up.
Speaker 4: To twenty Okay, but what does ten killer hurts fifteen killer?
Speaker 4: They're twenty killer hurts sound like? Also if you were like, oh,
Speaker 4: how embarrassing you messed up and some sound effects were missing. Congratulations,
Speaker 4: you're me. As Jarret and I were editing this, I
Speaker 4: kept telling him that the fifteen and the twenty killer
Speaker 4: herd sound effects were missing, and that's when I read
Speaker 4: his face and I learned that any sound above eleven
Speaker 4: killer hurts means nothing to my ears. They're gone. So
Speaker 4: thanks past me for attending warehouse parties in two thousand
Speaker 4: and seven with shitty djays. Let's not do that again.
Speaker 4: What are some of the questions that you're trying to
Speaker 4: answer other than what is out there?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you know, one of the ways that we
Speaker 3: use sound is actually.
Speaker 5: Kind of not even to ask cook who's there or
Speaker 5: who's making the stamp. But what is all of the
Speaker 5: sound telling us about the health of the environment.
Speaker 3: That we're learning is that in a really.
Speaker 5: Healthy, sort of intact environment, most of the acoustic space,
Speaker 5: if you like, gets filled up. And competing ideas about
Speaker 5: why that might be the case, but one of the
Speaker 5: key ones is this idea of something called the acoustic
Speaker 5: Niche hypothesis, which is that there's sort of acoustic space partitioning.
Speaker 5: So because we all want to be heard, all the
Speaker 5: animals in the forest will we heard over each other.
Speaker 5: They adapt their hearing to a particular frequency, and they
Speaker 5: adapt their speech to a particular frequency. And as a
Speaker 5: result of evolution of that intact environment means that most
Speaker 5: of the frequencies get kind of filled up.
Speaker 3: So you have a look you to think or recording
Speaker 3: and see.
Speaker 5: How many frequencies are full, how many of those spaces
Speaker 5: are occupied, indication of how healthy it is, and that
Speaker 5: what we are seeing really clearly in our data. And
Speaker 5: this gets to how we use it is as environments
Speaker 5: get degraded as we use them, we start seeing gaps
Speaker 5: open up in that acoustic spe You can sort of
Speaker 5: measure how many gaps there are and use that as
Speaker 5: an indication of how intact the forest is and how
Speaker 5: healthy it is, and that lets us ask questions like, Okay,
Speaker 5: the way we're currently using this sort of say, the
Speaker 5: way we're chopping trees, the way we're harvesting, how does
Speaker 5: that affect this particular forest or is this area that
Speaker 5: we have set aside as a protected area, a national
Speaker 5: park or something like that, is that big enough? Is
Speaker 5: that sustaining biodiversity or is there something else going on?
Speaker 5: And that ability to associate sound, the saturation of the
Speaker 5: sound with environmental health means you can apply to all
Speaker 5: sorts of questions that are really useful for a conservation
Speaker 5: organization like the nature conservancy.
Speaker 4: So imagine Waki Taki. There has a bunch of different
Speaker 4: channels and different organisms evolved to occupy those different channels,
Speaker 4: and when acoustic at colleges run the data and suddenly
Speaker 4: start to find in those frequency niches, that's a pretty
Speaker 4: big loud alarm bell that something's missing. So that's so cool.
Speaker 4: So you can look at it, say we're missing a
Speaker 4: lot of noises in this area, in this area that
Speaker 4: probably belongs to these type of insects or these kind
Speaker 4: of migratory birds. And then where do you go from there?
Speaker 3: Yeah, good questions where we started this for us?
Speaker 5: The secritic generals in Papua New Guinea and U Guina
Speaker 5: is a kind of fascinating place.
Speaker 3: Because the land is all owned.
Speaker 5: Under something called customary tenure, so the communities that live
Speaker 5: there essentially have control over their land. But it also
Speaker 5: means that they just they had this one area that
Speaker 5: they get to work in, and it's very hard to
Speaker 5: kind of combine and aggregate those so you don't have
Speaker 5: these quite vast forest tracts of national parks. You go
Speaker 5: out of forests, but it's divided into lots of different
Speaker 5: people's ownership, and that puts kind of a maximum size
Speaker 5: on how much area you could set aside for conservation,
Speaker 5: especially as people need to have areas also and grow
Speaker 5: enough food to live, harvest enough trees to build their houses,
Speaker 5: and growing population as well. So what we needed to
Speaker 5: know was whether if every community sets aside just a
Speaker 5: little piece of their forest, is that going to be
Speaker 5: enough to retain all the amazing species that live in
Speaker 5: these forests, these jungles of New Guinea.
Speaker 3: And so what we can do is go.
Speaker 5: And look at the patches of forests and record sounds,
Speaker 5: and record the sounds in different kinds of forests.
Speaker 3: And compare them.
Speaker 4: So what did they find?
Speaker 5: Actually, we don't see many things missing from forest, but
Speaker 5: as soon as we start chipping into them to plant
Speaker 5: a garden or remove some of the canopy, then we
Speaker 5: see that loss and we can measure that and continue
Speaker 5: to kind of track that.
Speaker 4: What about other types of acoustic monitoring, like for poaching,
Speaker 4: is that used in a completely different way than speeches monitoring.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker 5: So I guess a a few things that have been
Speaker 5: tried in different places. It's a little different because one
Speaker 5: of the things that was explored a lot with respect
Speaker 5: as poaching is whether you can hear things like gun
Speaker 5: shots or sort of legal harvest bulldos and chainsaws, things
Speaker 5: like that, and they're very distinctive sounds on recordings, partly
Speaker 5: because they're also very low frequencies sound. A lot of
Speaker 5: sounds that people make tend to be low frequencies, which
Speaker 5: also means they tend to travel a long way, so
Speaker 5: you can hear them from a long way away. So
Speaker 5: microphones are quite good at picking up those kinds of things.
Speaker 5: What's tricky is setting a system in place that would
Speaker 5: allow you to go and respond effectively to that sort
Speaker 5: of you know, be able to pick up a sound
Speaker 5: to go and respond in real time.
Speaker 3: That's tricky, especially so.
Speaker 5: Many places where this is happening I don't have reliable
Speaker 5: network connection. So sort of an ideal situation, you could
Speaker 5: set up a microphone that was sending a signal back
Speaker 5: and someone would go out immediately see how there's a gunshots,
Speaker 5: And that can happen in a few exceptional circumstances, but
Speaker 5: in general that's tough to do, especially also at these
Speaker 5: rainforests are really tough places on gear, so you have
Speaker 5: a pretty high just maintaining things and being out there
Speaker 5: in that kind of presence, and in some ways, you know,
Speaker 5: when you have that kind of presence in the environment,
Speaker 5: if you're there that frequently anyway, that can really help,
Speaker 5: That can really help the tour a lot of this
Speaker 5: illegal activity.
Speaker 4: How do you work with local groups to ensure that
Speaker 4: it's okay to do the monitoring? And I also from
Speaker 4: what I understand, you know, with things like illegal poaching,
Speaker 4: it's such a complicated socio political issue too on who
Speaker 4: is narking on who and all of that, Like, how
Speaker 4: how do you interface with some of the communities doing
Speaker 4: your field work?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that's a great question.
Speaker 5: And one of the beautiful things about this sort of
Speaker 5: ecology is that it really can get more people involved.
Speaker 5: It's not merely as specialist as what a lot of
Speaker 5: previous biodiversity surveys work. So in most of our projects,
Speaker 5: it's actually local communities that go out and do the monitoring. Yeah,
Speaker 5: you know, we are certainly helping a great deal in
Speaker 5: terms of coordinating the processing and analysis of their dagga.
Speaker 5: And it's really on our shoulders then to make sure
Speaker 5: we're working tightly with them on making sure they get
Speaker 5: to see the results of them and we're thinking through
Speaker 5: what the implications are. But in terms of going in
Speaker 5: and doing sort of placing microphats, that's something that lots
Speaker 5: of people can get involved in.
Speaker 4: So doctor Games says that acoustic ecologists work in really
Speaker 4: tight partnership with local communities to gather and analyze data
Speaker 4: so those living in the ecosystem can make these collective
Speaker 4: decisions on areas to develop and the species they might hunt.
Speaker 4: And studies estimate that globally, fifteen to thirty percent of
Speaker 4: timber plucked without permits, and in Indonesia, for example, that
Speaker 4: rate just goes up to over eighty percent. Eighty percent
Speaker 4: of the deforesting there is done illegally, so you don't
Speaker 4: have to live locally to be so pissed about that
Speaker 4: and just want to change yourself to something green. But
Speaker 4: scientists aren't necessarily in the business of enforcement, so things
Speaker 4: get kind of tricky there. But ecologist can harvest this
Speaker 4: useful data using everything from tree DNA to yes recording
Speaker 4: all these critters. In the case of acoustic ecologists, what
Speaker 4: about gear talk to me about gear. Are you using
Speaker 4: old cell phones that are repurposed? Are you having to
Speaker 4: get tiny tiny microphones? Is there so much like weathering
Speaker 4: that has to happen? Is their Wi Fi?
Speaker 3: All good questions?
Speaker 4: Do you know?
Speaker 3: There was a bit of a movement for a while
Speaker 3: on those old cell phones.
Speaker 5: Everyone pretty much walked away from that in the m
Speaker 5: just because the reliability is such an issu unit where
Speaker 5: you put the sort of emvironments they wanted is stampling.
Speaker 5: It's tough on gear, and it's certainly tough on cell phones.
Speaker 5: So nicely for Argua. Now we're using kind of purpose
Speaker 5: built gear that's pretty rug and it's fairly basic in essence,
Speaker 5: you know, mentioned kind of a little cases. The rugged
Speaker 5: box could be anything. We like, you know, aget to
Speaker 5: have the microphones on the bottom. Some people have their
Speaker 5: microphones sort of sticking out the side, but we found
Speaker 5: the birds tend to sit on them things things for so,
Speaker 5: I like my microphones at the bottom of the box.
Speaker 5: But funny stuff happens in the field all the time,
Speaker 5: and it's always a lot of troubleshoo. We were doing
Speaker 5: this recordings in Borneo where we had microphones out for
Speaker 5: a few were putting out for a few months at
Speaker 5: a time and taking regular recordings, often for full days,
Speaker 5: and they're coming back and collecting them. The first time
Speaker 5: we did it, heaps of the microphones had failed and
Speaker 5: had kind of water in them.
Speaker 3: Which was unusual because you know that these are pretty
Speaker 3: rugged things. And what we realized had happened in the
Speaker 3: end is we strapped the microphones and they're housing so
Speaker 3: tightly to the trees, and because it's the rainforest, these
Speaker 3: trees were growing so fast that they had grown over
Speaker 3: those three months enough to just bend the metal backplate
Speaker 3: ever so slightly and crack the cel open, and so yeah,
Speaker 3: so we we realize you've got it.
Speaker 5: Even though we were touching them with kind of cloth
Speaker 5: straps that we put them on. Really, you know, there's
Speaker 5: not sort of advantageous to put them on too type
Speaker 5: because you need to law enough room for the.
Speaker 3: Tree to grow.
Speaker 4: Have you ever had any of your gear stolen? Like
Speaker 4: someone's like, oh that rules and just kind of slips
Speaker 4: in behind you.
Speaker 5: Ah, you know what we have not Maybe they're sort
Speaker 5: of places where working in we've had trees fall on
Speaker 5: them and get broken.
Speaker 3: We've had often you have forests rats and things like that.
Speaker 5: You know, the phone, the phone, I'm dampening around the
Speaker 5: outside of the microphone.
Speaker 3: They're like that.
Speaker 5: So often you come back and all you just see
Speaker 5: is the kind of bare steel on the microphone.
Speaker 3: It's okay, you still get you still still with these
Speaker 3: data out of it. But most of our the work
Speaker 3: that I've been involved in, it's been fairly.
Speaker 5: Remote areas and on lands managed by communities or forestry companies,
Speaker 5: and there with the blessing of the community of the company.
Speaker 4: What about just noise pollution in general, speaking of humans,
Speaker 4: how much louder is Earth getting or is it getting
Speaker 4: higher because we're losing species?
Speaker 3: Oh? Good question.
Speaker 5: I think it's overall it's getting quiet. So really yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: in quite a meaningful way.
Speaker 3: It's one of the kind of shocking and most consistent
Speaker 3: things we see in our sampling, especially across the areas
Speaker 3: that I work in the Asia Pacific, is that usually
Speaker 3: environments have.
Speaker 5: These two big peaks of acoustic activity. We call them
Speaker 5: the dawn chorus. You also have the dust course at
Speaker 5: the end of the day, and they really are massive
Speaker 5: peaks of acoustic energy because you've got lots of species
Speaker 5: vocalizing around that time. Sometimes that's just actually where a
Speaker 5: lot of species have their peak of activity in these
Speaker 5: crepuscular moments, say the end of the day with Geno,
Speaker 5: it's a moment of changeover between the nighttime species, noctil species,
Speaker 5: and daytime species. So you just have these Usually when
Speaker 5: you look at a spectrogram of sound energy, just see
Speaker 5: a huge peak in those morning and evening sessions. And
Speaker 5: what we see is that's the environments are getting degraded.
Speaker 5: Just it's so consistently you see those peaks diminishing. The
Speaker 5: more damage you do, the more heavily we use, environments
Speaker 5: that just sort of flattens them out, dampens them down,
Speaker 5: And so we often talk about kind of the great
Speaker 5: Silent Dawn in a way that's sort of covering these environments.
Speaker 5: So you're right there to concern amongst many people about
Speaker 5: acoustic pollution, about the increasing amount of anthropogenic noise you
Speaker 5: see in these environments, and no doubts and there's probably
Speaker 5: some issues there, but overall, I think that becoming a
Speaker 5: quieter place.
Speaker 4: Wow, I never ever would have thought that. I would
Speaker 4: have thought that it's just getting more and more cacophonous
Speaker 4: with cars and bepep and that's scarier and sadder than
Speaker 4: I thought.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it is sad. Yeah, and we think it was
Speaker 5: a sad realization. We s don't see that too. Just
Speaker 5: just how consistent that is and just how striking that is,
Speaker 5: and it's how different it is to and you write
Speaker 5: the day to day experience that you and I have
Speaker 5: in kind of noisy environments where there is a lot
Speaker 5: of sound.
Speaker 3: But one of the things that blow those people away,
Speaker 3: if they ever get.
Speaker 5: The chance to experience it, is the amount of sound
Speaker 5: that you hear in really healthy forests, and especially if
Speaker 5: you have a chance to go to a rainforest, and
Speaker 5: even more so actually if you get to go to
Speaker 5: a rainforest or get to take a recording in a
Speaker 5: rainforest and put headphones on, my goodness, the amount.
Speaker 3: You can hear. I mean, it's just staggering. That's what
Speaker 3: we're That's what we're losing.
Speaker 4: What are the decibel levels like in a rainforest.
Speaker 3: Question?
Speaker 5: You know, microphones, we have a decibelt cutoff, just so
Speaker 5: we are not getting over We have an idea of
Speaker 5: how far away things are calling. Whether it's really loud
Speaker 5: or not often depends on whether you have a couple
Speaker 5: of characteristic animals close by cicadas or really loud and
Speaker 5: some some really loud burds. They can be genuinely noisy.
Speaker 4: So if you listen to cicadology, you may remember that
Speaker 4: in North America there's just a bunch of horny male
Speaker 4: cicadas that just scream their sexual intentions at nearly one
Speaker 4: hundred decibels, which is about the volume of an ambulance
Speaker 4: siren or twenty decibels louder than a Slayer concert. Is
Speaker 4: there anything more metal than that? There is and it's
Speaker 4: a bird called the screaming pih which has been recorded
Speaker 4: at one hundred and sixteen decibels. But boy, howdy, hot,
Speaker 4: damn hold the phone. Something is louder than a South
Speaker 4: American screaming piha than Northeast Amazonian white bell bird just
Speaker 4: busts into the tree party and announces its presence at
Speaker 4: one hundred and twenty decibels White bell bird? How about
Speaker 4: white loud as hell bird? And as someone who's been
Speaker 4: in the mosh pit at a ministry show but never
Speaker 4: stood in the middle of a rainforest, I now know
Speaker 4: which one is more hardcore.
Speaker 5: It's not so much the overall desert beels it's just
Speaker 5: that I guess you'd say almost like the acoustic complexity,
Speaker 5: like the amount of sound that's coming at different frequencies,
Speaker 5: even if each of those is not particularly loud itself.
Speaker 3: And that's also one of the great things about analyzing sound.
Speaker 5: Do you know, if we just listen to our hearing
Speaker 5: tends to get blown away by those loud animals, but.
Speaker 3: The microphone and the data in the computer doesn't.
Speaker 5: So if you have a really loud animal calling, it's
Speaker 5: still calling had a discrete set of frequencies.
Speaker 4: So it's the distinct species calls and the bigger trends
Speaker 4: that they're looking for. And by looking, I mean lessening,
Speaker 4: but also looking.
Speaker 5: So not not just listen, but also look at them
Speaker 5: on the screen on the spectrogram and try and separate
Speaker 5: our individual course. And even if we don't know what
Speaker 5: species it is, we can still identify, oh, hang about
Speaker 5: something else calling. There's a really good relationship between a
Speaker 5: number of animals calling and the overall saturation. And what
Speaker 5: that means is that you kind of no longer need
Speaker 5: to count.
Speaker 3: The animals every time. You can just look at this
Speaker 3: overall saturation, which is quite quick to count.
Speaker 5: However, there is a you know, it's a really interesting
Speaker 5: emerging bit of research that I'm sure we'll get more
Speaker 5: and more sophisticated, which is using algorithms to try and
Speaker 5: count the animals that are calling, to actually use some
Speaker 5: sort of machine learning tools to separate out all of
Speaker 5: the vocalizations into separate calls and saying, oh, yeah, you know,
Speaker 5: there's two hundred different animals calling in this half an
Speaker 5: hour or whatever it might be.
Speaker 3: That's a great and that's kind of a fun emerging
Speaker 3: area of research.
Speaker 4: So is AI starting to step in and be able
Speaker 4: to really do that analysis? Does that mean that there's
Speaker 4: a bunch of data analysts and computer programmers that can
Speaker 4: get into this field too totally?
Speaker 5: And actually, when I first started getting into this and
Speaker 5: I give talks to people, that's one of the things
Speaker 5: I was emphasizing, you know, like this, you don't have
Speaker 5: to be a kind of khaki wearing ecologist who just
Speaker 5: loves trumping around the rain for us to make a
Speaker 5: really meaningful contribution here. In fact, we need all the
Speaker 5: people that are programmers and computer scientists and sound engineers,
Speaker 5: the sort of people that could get involved and could
Speaker 5: make contributions that are hopefully intellectually stimulating for them, and
Speaker 5: we are seeing AI and machine learning tools being used
Speaker 5: more and more, and especially as we build up bigger
Speaker 5: and bigger data sets, there's a chance to analyze them.
Speaker 3: It's more thoroughly. Still at the beginning of these early
Speaker 3: stages takes a fair bit of human validation. You've got
Speaker 3: to provide some training to even the best algorithms.
Speaker 5: But it won't be long until we have some really
Speaker 5: well working automated algorithms that can.
Speaker 3: Help a lot of this.
Speaker 4: Where do people go if they want this type of job,
Speaker 4: If they're like, oh, I'm a sound engineer, I'm a
Speaker 4: computer programmer, I still want to work on this, Like
Speaker 4: where are the jobs?
Speaker 7: Oh?
Speaker 5: Good, good question. So you know, there's a bunch of
Speaker 5: different university groups. I guess now research is picking up
Speaker 5: this space, and that's one of the things that they
Speaker 5: have realized they need to recruit people with these kind
Speaker 5: of skills to do this work, and so some research
Speaker 5: groups have made that especially.
Speaker 3: We've been really lucky. We work a lot with a
Speaker 3: group at.
Speaker 5: The Queensland University of Technology who are really computer scientists
Speaker 5: and sound engineers. That's the thing.
Speaker 3: They've been wonderful partners for us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we had a listener. Alex Ertmann wrote in and said,
Speaker 4: this sounds like my dream job. I've been studying auditory
Speaker 4: neuroscience for a few years, but I've been thinking of
Speaker 4: pivoting into conservation. So yeah, there are people who are like, oh,
Speaker 4: this is a job you can have.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, it is about and I just I really
Speaker 5: think there's going to be so many more of these.
Speaker 5: It's already one of those things that I'm seeing the
Speaker 5: kind of for profit environments basically into too. So those
Speaker 5: people that are responsible for doing environmental impact assessments or
Speaker 5: environmental monitoring, and that might be associated with natural resource
Speaker 5: extraction industries. So if you run a mining company or
Speaker 5: a forestry company or something like that, you usually need
Speaker 5: to pay some want to help do some of this
Speaker 5: environmental monitoring. Almost all of those ferns doing that are
Speaker 5: now like, oh wow, I got to have a sort
Speaker 5: of acoustic ecology side of things because it's such an
Speaker 5: useful tool for us. And so take the number of
Speaker 5: jobs in this space going to really grow to and
Speaker 5: not just be in that research spacing, a lot of
Speaker 5: sort of net for profit environmental monitoring.
Speaker 4: Space as well, and ethically, does that help the mining
Speaker 4: company make less of an impact or are there ever
Speaker 4: any ethical concerns like I'm taking money from a mining
Speaker 4: company in the rainforest?
Speaker 3: Yeah, good question.
Speaker 5: I mean hopefully that's the point of doing this ongoing monitoring.
Speaker 5: What I mean challenges with lots of environmental monitoring in
Speaker 5: the past is that it really relies on who's doing
Speaker 5: accounting right, and you and I would count differently, even
Speaker 5: if we're sort of trained almost identically, we would still
Speaker 5: probably count slightly differently. And now that would be the
Speaker 5: same when we went to the forest, so we hear
Speaker 5: different things.
Speaker 3: And see different things.
Speaker 5: But microphones, if they calibrate the same here, same thing,
Speaker 5: no matter if you put it out or put it out,
Speaker 5: there's actually a chance to get something kind of more
Speaker 5: more robust, more pure data in this way. That should
Speaker 5: alleviate some of those ethical concerns. What you know, what
Speaker 5: a mining company does from that information and what their
Speaker 5: government does. What does it a permit people we showing
Speaker 5: permits do with that information could be another question. But
Speaker 5: I wouldn't have any sort of fundamental concerns about using
Speaker 5: tools like this in service of understanding the impacts of
Speaker 5: extractive industries.
Speaker 4: Can I ask you some questions from listeners? Okay, and
Speaker 4: we'll just lightning around. We'll go through as many as
Speaker 4: we can. How does it sound for it? You know what,
Speaker 4: Let's go for it. But first let's make it rainforest
Speaker 4: on a worthy charity this week. So doctor Eddie Game said,
Speaker 4: descend it to the Nature Conservancy. They are a global
Speaker 4: environmental nonprofit which is doing tons of good shit. The
Speaker 4: Nature Conservancy has a diverse staff. They work with over
Speaker 4: four hundred scientists to impact conservation in seventy six countries
Speaker 4: and territories, working also with local partners to tackle the
Speaker 4: dual threats of climate change and biodiversity loss. So more
Speaker 4: info is up at nature dot org. And we'll be
Speaker 4: making a donation in Eddie's name thanks to sponsors. Oologies, Mom,
Speaker 4: why did they call it Scottish cheese? It's cottage cheese, honey,
Speaker 4: And I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: Did dogs in other countries speak different languages?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I think so.
Speaker 4: When when we get there, well, we've got to fix
Speaker 4: the car first. But there's someone coming to help us.
Speaker 4: Is it the man from Geneva? Not Geneva, he's from
Speaker 4: a Viva. Oh there's the van. Now for car insurance
Speaker 4: with breakdown rescue. It takes a Viva visit Aviva Dota
Speaker 4: E to say fifteen percent.
Speaker 7: Acceptance criteria, terms and conditions apply. Minimum premium of three
Speaker 7: hundred and ten year old. Fifteen percent discant applies to
Speaker 7: new policies bought online. See Aviva Dota E for details.
Speaker 7: Car insurance is underwritten by Aviva Insurance Ireland dak Aviva
Speaker 7: Direct Arland Limited is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.
Speaker 4: Okay, you hollered questions via Patreon and we listened, So
Speaker 4: I gotta say. Eddie says that you all have really
Speaker 4: good questions. So every time he seems impressed with a question,
Speaker 4: feel free to maybe do a very very tiny, imperceptible
Speaker 4: but dance that only you know about. Here we go. Okay,
Speaker 4: so Jesse and just one, we're both interested in Jesse's words.
Speaker 4: Is there a standard way to describe sounds scientifically?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 4: Are there words that everyone agrees on to describe what
Speaker 4: something sounds like?
Speaker 3: What's such a good question?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 3: I don't think there is that.
Speaker 5: There's been a little there was a little bit of
Speaker 5: a push to do some standardization in the way we
Speaker 5: talked about sounds and the way we ana life stance.
Speaker 5: And that's at a meeting four or five years ago
Speaker 5: where there was sort of a big community of acoustic
Speaker 5: at colleges around the world, and that was all anyone
Speaker 5: talked about, was do we need a standarized way that
Speaker 5: we can all be talking about the same thing and
Speaker 5: doing the same thing. My sense at the time was
Speaker 5: it was just just kind of too early for that.
Speaker 5: That would be cutting off a lot of creativity and
Speaker 5: mot The people are still just figuring out interesting stuff
Speaker 5: to do, and it was kind of.
Speaker 3: Growling every day. So I guess is we'll get to
Speaker 3: a point where there is some more standard language, but.
Speaker 4: Not there yet, still emerging. We're listening for more details
Speaker 4: on that.
Speaker 3: I think that's one of the cool things about acoustic.
Speaker 3: It's still a field that people say, oh, I've got
Speaker 3: a good idea about.
Speaker 5: How we should talk about saying you said them, and
Speaker 5: people are really receptive at the moment.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's so. There were several patrons. Kelly the Nature
Speaker 4: Nerd also wrote in and asked, do you feel like
Speaker 4: there's a lot of opportunities out there in this field?
Speaker 4: So yes, conservation conservation nerds get on it, Okay, great question.
Speaker 4: Miranda Panda and Mike Manakowski both asked, are there animals
Speaker 4: that people have heard but not seen before?
Speaker 3: Oh? Good question, There probably is.
Speaker 5: The ones I really come to mind are ones that
Speaker 5: we've heard for a long time and took a long
Speaker 5: time to find. And as a great example here in
Speaker 5: the desks of a stranger, something called the night parrot.
Speaker 5: It's almost like a mythical bird that had been only
Speaker 5: seen a couple of times by sort of reliable descriptions
Speaker 5: of it.
Speaker 3: We knew was that and we started hearing it, hear.
Speaker 4: That bell that is the sound or the night patt if.
Speaker 5: People started putting a microphones and recording it. Still, it
Speaker 5: took a long time to find it, but we knew
Speaker 5: it was there in some of these remote desert areas
Speaker 5: in Australia because we're hearing it.
Speaker 3: I did.
Speaker 5: There's quite a few cases like that where we're using
Speaker 5: sam to find the presence of animals that dan are
Speaker 5: very very difficult to actually see.
Speaker 4: Okay, so remind me to do an entire episode on
Speaker 4: this bush dwelling night parrot of Australia because there is
Speaker 4: gossip and it is hot. So first off, this bird
Speaker 4: has absolutely baller aliases, including the porcupine parrot and the
Speaker 4: midnight cockatoo, which will be my code names if I'm
Speaker 4: ever a spy. And people thought it was extinct. They
Speaker 4: were like, it's so dead. And then a guy saw
Speaker 4: one in twenty thirteen and photographed it. One ornithological enthusiast
Speaker 4: named Sean Dooley called this sighting quote the bird watching
Speaker 4: equivalent of finding Elvis flipping burgers in an outback roadhouse.
Speaker 4: But people started to debunk that evidence and the whole
Speaker 4: thing was shady, and then acoustic ecology confirmed some calls,
Speaker 4: and using leads from Aboriginal knowledge, the bird was confirmed
Speaker 4: to exist. Everyone's like, it's alive. It's not well, but
Speaker 4: it's alive. Are you a burder on the side, by
Speaker 4: the way, I'm not at all any fact.
Speaker 5: I do my graduate study in a lab that was
Speaker 5: completely full of birders, so I think I actually probably
Speaker 5: urged my brain of birding knowledge so that I wouldn't
Speaker 5: have to compete with them anymore.
Speaker 4: That's so funny, because I've I have heard that birders
Speaker 4: there are different, like lifer lists. If you hear an
Speaker 4: l hoot but you don't see it. Some people count that.
Speaker 4: Some people don't, but if you're an a cologist, you count.
Speaker 3: That right totally.
Speaker 5: And now you know, I work with a great mini
Speaker 5: birds and many of my close acoustic collaborators they are
Speaker 5: very keen burdens. So there's a lot of entsiasm amongst
Speaker 5: the birding community for acoustic ecology.
Speaker 4: Oh for sure, I'm sure. It's also like, is that cheating?
Speaker 5: Well yeah, I mean that you could. You could do
Speaker 5: many podcasts, so the ethics of different birding. You know,
Speaker 5: whether you're able to play back sounds of a bird
Speaker 5: to get it to come out and things like that.
Speaker 4: Oh, we had actually a ton of questions on that.
Speaker 4: And let's see from listeners Elijah and specs OWL. A
Speaker 4: few people wanted to know, is calling back to animals
Speaker 4: a terrible thing? Is it ethical? Do the animals know
Speaker 4: that we're having inner species conversations? Elijah wants to know. So, yeah,
Speaker 4: have you heard anything in acoustic ecology about whether or
Speaker 4: not calling to an animal to get a to call back?
Speaker 1: Is is?
Speaker 4: Okay?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's goodcause, I mean it's something that's worth considering
Speaker 3: the ethics.
Speaker 5: And I think whenever you do research or do a
Speaker 5: study that would involve a playback that is a good
Speaker 5: thing that that goes through some sort of ethics consideration
Speaker 5: at that stage. Now I said, I think there's a
Speaker 5: lot of utilities. It really can be very useful to
Speaker 5: do that. I'm thinking particularly in cases of like there's
Speaker 5: a really rare frogs. For instance, there's a really rare
Speaker 5: frog and an amazing thing for your listeners.
Speaker 6: Get just to google.
Speaker 5: Lets you google the corrobberie frog in Australia, and it's
Speaker 5: really difficult to see a small corobbery frog, but they
Speaker 5: happen to have this feature of liking to call back.
Speaker 5: So it's a really useful way to work out how
Speaker 5: many are there if you go and do a call
Speaker 5: and then record the sound in it.
Speaker 3: When you hear these callbacks, hey wrong, Hey wrong.
Speaker 5: So I think I think there can be some really
Speaker 5: good reasons to do those callbacks. But yeah, it's worth
Speaker 5: considering whether there is kind of any like real to
Speaker 5: be any kind of behavioral implications to the animals of
Speaker 5: doing that. And it's funny we're trying to understand how
Speaker 5: sound moved through the environment in Borneo because one of
Speaker 5: the things that we came to realize is that microphones
Speaker 5: here different different distances from them, depending on how dense
Speaker 5: the environment is, kind of whether you're on the hilltop
Speaker 5: or a.
Speaker 3: Valley, things like that.
Speaker 5: And we wanted to build some statistical models that would
Speaker 5: allow us to correct for how far a microphone were here,
Speaker 5: so that we were comparing each microphone the same. So
Speaker 5: we climbed to the top of a tree and we
Speaker 5: were pretending to be Givens. So strapped a big speaker
Speaker 5: to the top of a tree and play these given sounds,
Speaker 5: and we had microphones at different distances, and we were
Speaker 5: seeing how strong the given signal was there because we
Speaker 5: wanted to use it to survey Givens. And Gibbons are
Speaker 5: an amazing creature. That's sort of the most iconic sound
Speaker 5: of the center of the Borne and rain forest. But
Speaker 5: we were just doing this to record that the artificial
Speaker 5: Givens out of the play that consent. But of course
Speaker 5: all the Givens in the neighborhoods like, who's this new set.
Speaker 3: Of Givens here? What are you doing here? And I
Speaker 3: came over and started calling and say, hey, this is
Speaker 3: our path. You should get out of here.
Speaker 5: Wow. But yeah, the Gibbons probably didn't appreciate suddenly hearing
Speaker 5: a bunch of new givens in they're like.
Speaker 4: Do you buy Yeah, okay, just a heads up. So
Speaker 4: mimicking calls or playing recorded animal noises, it's kind of
Speaker 4: a dick move. Now. Do some people play owl hooting
Speaker 4: from a bluetooth speaker to try to get a glimpse
Speaker 4: of an owl on their deck? Absolutely, and bird scientists
Speaker 4: hate those people because the owls show up, they're so
Speaker 4: ready to get it on. They're either there for a
Speaker 4: mate or they think they gotta throw wings at a rival,
Speaker 4: and it's just you there, smelly in a bathrobe on
Speaker 4: your porch taking pictures of them. So don't make a
Speaker 4: bird hate you. Birds are so much cooler than us.
Speaker 4: We had a ton of listeners, Carrie Caximo Garve's, Carly V.
Speaker 4: Shelby Rearden, Ewen Menroe, Kelly the Nature Nerd, and Beth
Speaker 4: Balouz for some question asker, in Beth's words, what's the
Speaker 4: biggest surprise you've experienced when listening back to a recording
Speaker 4: or what just some of the weirdest, serious sounds that
Speaker 4: you've heard?
Speaker 3: A good questions do you know this is gonna saynd funny,
Speaker 3: but that one of those things.
Speaker 5: That's quite eerie when you're listening back is when insects
Speaker 5: come really close to the microphone. I'm thinking mosquito, just
Speaker 5: even like a common mosquito. So most of the time
Speaker 5: you're hearing all these one of them, and occasionally hear
Speaker 5: this kind of like it's like a science fiction soundtrack
Speaker 5: of the mosquito sound just getting a little bit closer.
Speaker 5: And when you hear it when you've got headphones on
Speaker 5: any listening, instead of a very kind of it's a
Speaker 5: very kind of cute sound here coming and landing on
Speaker 5: the microphone and then going off again that that sort
Speaker 5: of never sees.
Speaker 3: Just to be a little bit eerie.
Speaker 4: Are you ever tempted to sample and make some tracks
Speaker 4: like specs Owl asked if you're interested in the work
Speaker 4: of Chris Watson, who makes nature sounds intom garden music.
Speaker 4: Are you ever Yes, this would make a pretty good beat.
Speaker 5: And you know what, and it is in Some of
Speaker 5: our sounds have been in lots of different ways too.
Speaker 5: So some of our recordings from how he got turned
Speaker 5: into a piece of orchestral music actually for a present
Speaker 5: concerts at one point. And a close colleague of mine
Speaker 5: has a pretty avant garde group that involves electronic music
Speaker 5: and a double bass and fish sounds that recordings that
Speaker 5: they've taken in the rivers.
Speaker 3: It fits very cool. We even did a live performance once.
Speaker 3: It was pretty good.
Speaker 1: What is it called?
Speaker 5: Ohya, Simon Linky is the person is the guy who's
Speaker 5: setting up. He's a Griffith University in Australia, so you
Speaker 5: could look up here. I don't think the group actually
Speaker 5: had a name, but they performed at a festival a
Speaker 5: wonderful sort of live mixing of fish sound recordings taken
Speaker 5: from their acoustic ecology work and electronics and double based.
Speaker 4: Fish sounds. And we had some questions about COVID and Wales.
Speaker 4: Meryl Stark wanted to know tell me more about what
Speaker 4: happened when shipping was shut down in the North Atlantic
Speaker 4: during COVID and everything went quiet, and a lot of
Speaker 4: wood wanted to know how much does noise pollution mess
Speaker 4: with whale and dolphin calls and antonia Clerk and Ale
Speaker 4: Holmes also asked about underwater noise because you mentioned that
Speaker 4: it's getting quieter on land, but are things different in
Speaker 4: the ocean.
Speaker 5: Oh, lots of good questions there, and you know I'm
Speaker 5: probably not the best place to say to speak a
Speaker 5: lot to what happened in that kind of COVID shutdown
Speaker 5: and then the response he saw in the North Atlantic.
Speaker 5: But certainly we know that the sort of acoustic interference
Speaker 5: of cetaceans, whales and dolphins is a pretty big issue,
Speaker 5: and that it is harder for them to communicate and
Speaker 5: navigate well in places that are really busy with a
Speaker 5: lot of acoustic SAMs.
Speaker 3: And I think I said.
Speaker 5: Earlier that you know, these low frequency sounds travel so far,
Speaker 5: and especially true and water, and the diesel engine of
Speaker 5: a ship is one of the lowest frequency sounds in here,
Speaker 5: and so the.
Speaker 3: Extent of that pollution is extraordinary. One of the most
Speaker 3: amazing sonic experiences I've ever listened to a woman here
Speaker 3: in Australia called Leah Barclay, and what she had done
Speaker 3: was had microphones that drift down the coast and she
Speaker 3: had them floating and recording down the eastern coast of
Speaker 3: Australia and we listened to these in a dark room
Speaker 3: with sort of speakers all the way around us, and
Speaker 3: it was like this sonic journey as you come down
Speaker 3: from the Gray Berrier reef, and as you get closer
Speaker 3: to the cities that have been pought Sydney and things
Speaker 3: like that, just the sam even when you're tens hundreds
Speaker 3: of klometers aware, you just hear this.
Speaker 5: Sort of grumbling sound, like a growing growing into It
Speaker 5: sort of takes over the entire soundscape and then fades
Speaker 5: away again as the drifting microphones went past these cities.
Speaker 3: Extraordinary experience.
Speaker 5: It gave me such an insight that just how altered
Speaker 5: that sonic environment is in the marine space.
Speaker 4: Does that interfere with echolocation? Maria Manser wanted to know
Speaker 4: are mammals, you know, like dolphins and whales and bats,
Speaker 4: are they using acoustic ecology and do those human made
Speaker 4: acoustics really mess with them?
Speaker 5: Yeah, because I mean that I think there is quite
Speaker 5: a lot of evidence supporting the idea that those human
Speaker 5: anthropogenic sounds and say that they do interfere with the
Speaker 5: ability of whales and dolphins to communicate them. And what's
Speaker 5: probably less clear is how that manifests in terms of
Speaker 5: behavioral changes, but I think there's definitely an impact. One
Speaker 5: of the things with learnyone has said about underwater sounds
Speaker 5: is that there's a lot of things other than whales
Speaker 5: and dolphins that are using sound cues. So there's a
Speaker 5: hypothesis even that fish on the Great Barrier reef, for instance,
Speaker 5: use the sound of reefs as a queue to find
Speaker 5: them in the drifting around in the plankton in this
Speaker 5: sort of vast ocean, and the reefs are actually very
Speaker 5: small in comparison to the vast ocean, and.
Speaker 4: These tiny bebe fish liarvae are drifting around the ocean
Speaker 4: just looking for some slicer reef to call home, and
Speaker 4: acoustic ecologists think that they're using sound to find them,
Speaker 4: like the tiniest, most critical game of Marco Polo with
Speaker 4: like a New Landlord.
Speaker 5: We're certainly seeing evidence that when you see things like
Speaker 5: coral reese get degraded, either through coral bleaching, climate driven events,
Speaker 5: or through other forms of degradation, pollution, sediment, things like that,
Speaker 5: they are getting quieter because the same thing you're seeing
Speaker 5: having on land. You're just losing some of the vocalizing
Speaker 5: diversity from those environments, and that is probably having a
Speaker 5: bigger impact than we realize on the overall ecology of system.
Speaker 5: How animals sort of navigate their way around those environments
Speaker 5: and are all of.
Speaker 4: These animals actually hearing or are they sensing the vibrations
Speaker 4: like batman flight, who's a chiropterologist. I'm asked if any
Speaker 4: animals use infrasound to send messages. Further, like, how much
Speaker 4: of this is so so low that it's in kind
Speaker 4: of another realm for us?
Speaker 5: Yeah, good question. I mean possibly lots this. I guess
Speaker 5: if you go back to the very early ideas of
Speaker 5: how sound and involved as communication, probably the earlier passions
Speaker 5: were just things that vibrations that we felt, vibrations that
Speaker 5: we made and we felt this vibration. It's actually as
Speaker 5: a book recently out American author David Haskill, I think
Speaker 5: it's called Sounds Wild and Broken, and he talks a
Speaker 5: lot about the origins of sound.
Speaker 3: And there are still lots of animals that are.
Speaker 5: Communicating through the vibration that they're not hearing it, certainly
Speaker 5: not in the way that we hear sounds.
Speaker 3: You know, we're fairly unique having this.
Speaker 5: I guess hearing through the air and the way we do,
Speaker 5: but hearing through things like water is a way of
Speaker 5: really feeling, and that lots of animals essentially hearing vibrations
Speaker 5: in the water have you.
Speaker 4: Ever heard the thoughts about infrasound and the roar of
Speaker 4: a lion and why that's so terrifying to some mammals.
Speaker 4: Does that ever come up in your No, I don't
Speaker 4: know that. It's like, apparently it's some some really low
Speaker 4: frequency that just like hackles go up, and some ghost
Speaker 4: hunters or people who are looking into ghosts have found
Speaker 4: that just a low, low rumble from a fan will
Speaker 4: give us the same eerie feeling. That's so something that
Speaker 4: we can't hear, but we're like, I got really spooked
Speaker 4: when I went in that basement. It's just because there's
Speaker 4: like a fan that's going too low for them to hear,
Speaker 4: but they can kind of sense it.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's fascinating.
Speaker 5: Yeah, do you know that's interesting because one of the
Speaker 5: things I had read in David's book, he was describing
Speaker 5: how the way that we often hear sounds of dinosaurs
Speaker 5: in films and nothing like what their anatomy would suggest
Speaker 5: they made, and in fact, the sounds that they give
Speaker 5: to that they use the terannosaurs, things like Jurassic Park
Speaker 5: our a combination of really like slowed down baby elephant
Speaker 5: trumpets and lion rules.
Speaker 3: Because it induces the response that they want.
Speaker 4: The terrannosaurs, I wonder what they actually sounded.
Speaker 3: Like, but they were like, huh, well, yeah, I mean
Speaker 3: the reptiles hear differently, and so you know, they certainly
Speaker 3: were able to make stamp probably quite different. The sounds
Speaker 3: that we think are a sort of characteristic to our
Speaker 3: current hearing in the way and.
Speaker 4: We hear yeah, I mean, just based on how a
Speaker 4: chicken sounds not too scared exactly. Last listener question one
Speaker 4: sent in from Celaste, who said, have you ever listened
Speaker 4: to or studied the sound of a creature who's on
Speaker 4: the brink of extinction or who has since become extinct?
Speaker 4: I find this notion to be incredibly depressing, and yet
Speaker 4: it is the question I have. And Timothy Wang said,
Speaker 4: how to feel less shitty about the world losing rainforests?
Speaker 4: Cry face emoji, any hope, any any way that you
Speaker 4: deal with things emotionally.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, it's a good question, and it's something
Speaker 3: that I have to deal with. Really. You know what
Speaker 3: gives me hope is what how thriving I see even
Speaker 3: small patches of brain price. You know, we've given a
Speaker 3: lot of abuse to this planet. But if we can
Speaker 3: even just save some small pieces. It's just astounding how
Speaker 3: much biodversity can be protected in them. And one of
Speaker 3: the places I've been lucky to work enough is in
Speaker 3: Borneo and there's this one patch of forests is not
Speaker 3: particularly big. I mean, I guess it's certainly decent sized
Speaker 3: by a sort of built upstands, So fifty thousand acres
Speaker 3: or so. When you look at it a map, it
Speaker 3: seems tiny, but when it's dense rainforests, it's hard to
Speaker 3: walk across.
Speaker 5: And it wasn't that long ago that we rediscovered a
Speaker 5: species of prime made even a langer, a monkey that
Speaker 5: was thought to be extinct, that has a troop of
Speaker 5: them in this area. And I think, you know, if
Speaker 5: you go places of this and you see what has
Speaker 5: been left in tact, there's hope that we're we're not going.
Speaker 3: To record all and if we could just find a
Speaker 3: way to kind of sort of stop the hemorrhaging of
Speaker 3: these virus, which I really do think is going to happen,
Speaker 3: and I just think that's going to be untenable. And
Speaker 3: then a lot of people are starting to realize that
Speaker 3: on lots of levels. Then you know that nature will
Speaker 3: come back.
Speaker 4: Also, if you listen closely, you can hear morning birds
Speaker 4: just Triberty cheap and right behind him. So what this
Speaker 4: episode lacks in microphone quality makes up for with bird cameos.
Speaker 4: We did it do movies and TV? Do they get
Speaker 4: rainforest sounds right? If you go to the Rainforest Cafe
Speaker 4: ever in like Las Vegas. Are you like this is
Speaker 4: so wrong? No?
Speaker 3: Sometimes they do. Actually again, sometimes it's pretty good. I
Speaker 3: mean that they're the sort of people often that the
Speaker 3: people that are collecting the atmos.
Speaker 5: For these recordings. There are often people that go into
Speaker 5: this kind of sound recording and sound in college that
Speaker 5: we've been lucky in sort of the equality space to
Speaker 5: recruit people who are already interested in rainforest sound recordings.
Speaker 5: What we often don't have is the way to play
Speaker 5: it back to ourselves that like an actual rainforest environment,
Speaker 5: because you need to have a whole part of different speakers.
Speaker 5: There's sort of almost three sixty degrees immersion, and they
Speaker 5: believe that speakers that can really reflect those different frequencies.
Speaker 5: So it's probably less about the actually what the recording
Speaker 5: is than how we get to listen to it.
Speaker 4: Again, I have never thought about that like that kind
Speaker 4: of surround sound plus smells and humidity and snakes and
Speaker 4: books and birds. What about those apps that have gentle
Speaker 4: rainfall or birds sounds? I always want to know.
Speaker 5: You know, that's so funny. I guess you hear a
Speaker 5: lot of rain when you're in the rainforest. There's one
Speaker 5: of the sort of bane of our recordings is filtering
Speaker 5: out rain. But you know, I do not find rain
Speaker 5: like healthy rain forest is.
Speaker 3: Not relaxing to listen to. Like when you're listening to
Speaker 3: that like gentle rainforest, that's.
Speaker 5: Like either like the middle of the day when things
Speaker 5: are at the quietest and just hearing a little bit
Speaker 5: of sort of gentle sound every now and again. If
Speaker 5: you're actually listening to a rainforest, that's it's p activity.
Speaker 5: Like Yeah, I don't think anyone would describe it, but it's.
Speaker 3: Kind of calm.
Speaker 4: Well, you know you mentioned that you're an early raiser.
Speaker 5: Do you.
Speaker 4: Enjoy the sound of bird song as you know it
Speaker 4: becomes done as the sun comes out?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I think you enjoy being in nature that space it is.
Speaker 5: It's a time when when nature is really alive, and
Speaker 5: it is also often a time before people get up
Speaker 5: and start moving around, So I think there's something specially
Speaker 5: about being out and about.
Speaker 3: In nature at that time.
Speaker 4: What about the hardest thing about your job? What is
Speaker 4: so frustrating?
Speaker 5: Oh, you know, without question, and I'm going to totally
Speaker 5: watch this this quote, but I remember I said, once
Speaker 5: I've been here Wilson, look as if you live and
Speaker 5: when you have a sort of price of an ecological
Speaker 5: education is that you live in a world of wounds.
Speaker 3: And that's definitely that's definitely a bit true. Like you
Speaker 3: often see.
Speaker 5: Wow, you know we've given that up hiding and that's
Speaker 5: probably the toughest part. I mean, I'm I think because
Speaker 5: you get to get up each morning and try and
Speaker 5: do something at better, it's tough. Also saying that I mentioned,
Speaker 5: that's true for many many different professions that work in
Speaker 5: that crossis response type situation.
Speaker 4: Also, the late EO. Wilson was a biologist and a naturalist,
Speaker 4: and I debated leaving that quote in because EO. Wilson
Speaker 4: has been criticized for being a little racist. From what
Speaker 4: I gather, and I am elated to inform us all
Speaker 4: that that was actually a quote from Aldo Leopold, who
Speaker 4: was an ecologist and the granddaddy of wildlife management. And
Speaker 4: the full quote is one of the penalties of an
Speaker 4: ecological education is that one lives alone in a world
Speaker 4: of wounds. So that was an Aldo Leopold quote. And
Speaker 4: I looked up his history and he was born in
Speaker 4: the late eighteen hundreds and whoops, yep. Also probably not
Speaker 4: the least racist person ever. So all right, so that's
Speaker 4: the worst thing. Now on many levels, let's look on
Speaker 4: the bright sides. What about the best thing about it?
Speaker 4: What about the thing that you just love and could
Speaker 4: keep doing forever?
Speaker 5: Oh well, I mean, I just love the fact that
Speaker 5: all of this is working towards a legacy of something
Speaker 5: that I have enjoyed and really appreciated, interaction with the
Speaker 5: natural world, and hoping we can continue that for other people.
Speaker 5: But sort of on a day to day basis. I
Speaker 5: just also love the people that are involved in the
Speaker 5: conservation space and the world in all sorts of aspects
Speaker 5: of it. It's just a really very collegiate and interesting,
Speaker 5: enjoyable group of people to be on this mission with.
Speaker 4: Now, I'm sure that you have so many different people
Speaker 4: who do so many different things as well. It's got
Speaker 4: to be cool to see all these ideas come together.
Speaker 3: It is it Isn't you know?
Speaker 5: Acoustics a great idea because that's opened up a whole
Speaker 5: new part of people because we discussed are now getting
Speaker 5: involved in new people who are interested in us. I've
Speaker 5: got to talk to a lot of people that I
Speaker 5: wouldn't have so yeah, tracks a great cast of people.
Speaker 4: Oh that's awesome. Thank you so much for talking to me.
Speaker 4: This has been so illuminating, illuminating and music to my ears.
Speaker 3: Heay pleasure, Eli. Thanks thanks for having the conversation.
Speaker 4: So ask quiet ecologists, loud, brazen questions, but actually would
Speaker 4: do it politely because you know there's a whole world
Speaker 4: that you can learn about when you listen, So ask questions,
Speaker 4: take a risk. You're good. Also, thank you to everyone
Speaker 4: who's just been listening to my secrets at the end
Speaker 4: of the shows the last couple of weeks and wishing
Speaker 4: me and my family all the best. I'm really grateful
Speaker 4: for you and for science as we just keep on
Speaker 4: keeping on cancer be damned. Thank you to doctor Eddie
Speaker 4: Game and the Nature Conservancy, which you can find at
Speaker 4: nature dot org. A ton of links are up on
Speaker 4: my website at aliwar dot com, slash Ologies, slash Acoustic ecology,
Speaker 4: which is linked in the show notes too, you don't
Speaker 4: have to write it down. Thank you to Aaron Talbert
Speaker 4: for admitting the ologies podcast Facebook group. Thanks Shannon Felts
Speaker 4: and Bonnie Dutch who help out too. Thank you to
Speaker 4: every patron at page You're on dot com slash ologies
Speaker 4: who supports the show and sends in questions. It's a
Speaker 4: buck a month to join. Susan Hale does so much
Speaker 4: behind the scenes, including handling merch at ologiesmerch dot com
Speaker 4: if you want it. Thank you Noel Dilworth for all
Speaker 4: the scheduling and amazingness. Emily White of the Word remakes
Speaker 4: our professional transcripts. Caleb Patton Bleeps episodes, and those are
Speaker 4: both up for free on our website at Aliward dot
Speaker 4: com slash ologies dash extras. Every few weeks we release
Speaker 4: a new Somologies episode which has been trimmed of sex
Speaker 4: and filth and my swears and made bite size for
Speaker 4: all ages. Secred Riggus Thomas of Mindgem Media makes those
Speaker 4: happen with assists from Stephen Ray Morris. Kelly Dwyer is
Speaker 4: the website wrangler. She could make yours do. Nick Thorburn
Speaker 4: of the band Islands made the theme music and each
Speaker 4: week the bird Song of My Dawn. Jared Sleeper of
Speaker 4: Mindgem Media puts these all together and boosts sounds where
Speaker 4: it's quiet, and is also helping me and my family
Speaker 4: out so much. I just want to throw him a
Speaker 4: parade every day. So just in case anyone's around the
Speaker 4: fence about marrying their longtime crush who's also a sound engineer,
Speaker 4: I've just personally it's worked out great for me. So
Speaker 4: five stars on y'all, And if you stick around until
Speaker 4: the end of the episode, I tell you secret. This
Speaker 4: week's secret is that today's highlight was pointing out some
Speaker 4: deer out of the back window for my dad, who
Speaker 4: loved spotting them from under a blanket in his cozy
Speaker 4: chair and taking pictures on his iPad. Also another secret
Speaker 4: is sometimes I'm really afraid to read the reviews at
Speaker 4: the top of the show. I'm like, oh, hope these
Speaker 4: are nice. So thank you to everyone who always leaves
Speaker 4: nice ones for real, it makes my day. Okay, thanks
Speaker 4: for sticking around. Bye, my.
Speaker 3: You're the birds.
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