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