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All Of It with Alison Stewart
The Strange World Of Underwater Ocean Sounds
00:17:14
Instead of thinking of the ocean as a silent body of water, a new book demonstrates how important sound is in the lives of sea creatures.
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- [00:04]
Amarena Kingdon
Listener supported WNYC Studios.
- [00:18]
Alison Stewart
This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart. Today we're sharing some conversation hosted by Kusha Navadar here on all of it. He stepped in as guest host when I was out. So let's get into another one of those conversations. This one's about marine noises and what it sounds like, to quote Sebastian, down where it's better, down where it's wetter under the sea.
- [00:44]
Koosha Navadar
Because of how sound moves through water. There's actually more noise down there where vibrations can travel farther and faster than the air. But those sounds are alien to us. We don't intuitively know how to make sense of them like we do with sound on land. But you know who does know how to make sense of underwater sounds? It's underwater creatures. There's a new book called Sing Like a How Sound Rules Life Underwater. And it explores the sonic world of the oceans. From coral that can hear without ears. And here is in quotation marks there, but they can hear without ears. To the ways that beluga whales communicate something we might recognize as identity. To the global growl underwater caused by the shipping industry and how it's impacting ecosystems that rely heavily on the information that that sound carries. Joining me now is the author of the book Amarina Kingdon Amerina. Welcome to all of it.
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Amarena Kingdon
Thank you so much.
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Koosha Navadar
It's wonderful to have you here. This book, I love the title, Sing Like a Fish. And you write about how as a child, you noticed how sound works differently underwater, even if you didn't yet understand the science to explain it. So for, for folks who haven't submerged in a while, can you remind. It sounds like.
- [02:04]
Amarena Kingdon
Yeah. So I think a lot of people kind of have this experience. You know, for me, it was when I was swimming with my brother and we were trying to play underwater and you just kind of sound seems really muffled. Voices in particular really don't work. Like, I think a lot of kids will stick their heads underwater and try to scream at each other, yell at each other, and they'll realize, like, my brother and I did, that, like sound, you can't hear each other, so you just start yelling bad words, of course.
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Koosha Navadar
Right.
- [02:32]
Amarena Kingdon
Or if, you know, if you jump in a swimming pool or even, even sometimes if you're like having a bath and you dunk your head and you just get this sense that sound doesn't really work down there. So like I said in the book, or kind of like, I realized where you can't kind of perceive something, it's really hard for humans to Imagine that it exists. And so I think a lot of us just don't really think about it. And then the wonderful Captain Jacques Cousteau back in the 1950s, of course, did a very famous movie called the Silent World. And this trope of the ocean and the sea as being quiet and silent just kind of stuck. And it's only in the last couple decades that we've really started to listen to and untangle. And, you know, there were people who are pioneers beforehand that were looking and listening underwater, but it's only in the last little while that we've really started to bring it into the mainstream of science.
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Koosha Navadar
Yeah. And like, now as an adult, what did you learn about this subject that made you say, hey, there's a book here?
- [03:31]
Amarena Kingdon
So I was a staff writer for a magazine here in Victoria in British Columbia called Hack Eyed Magazine, and they do coastal science. And right away, like Victoria, British Columbia, is situated in a really interesting little waterway. So it's called the Salish Sea. And we have the ports of Seattle, Vancouver, and Victoria all kind of in one very small space. We also have a cruise ship port, we have two military bases, and we also have an endangered population of very beloved killer whales. And so there's just a lot of sound science going on. There's a lot of discussion of animals underwater and how humans make sound underwater. And so I was working for Hakai magazine, and I was starting to find more and more stories where there was mention of humans having an impact or, you know, somehow interfering with animals sound underwater. And whenever I heard this, I would just have this kind of intuitive blip in my mind. Like, I just wouldn't quite be able to picture it. Like, I think of something like an oil spill or a ship strike, and I can see it. Like, it makes sense to me. When someone describes that as a. As a problem, I'm like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. But when I would hear about sound being a problem for animals, I would just think I just didn't quite get it. And then I started to get more and more stories about how sound can interfere with the interactions that animals have. And the more that I understood those interactions and how critical they were, like, sound can change cleaner ras fish and the rate at which they try to clean their client fish. Sound can interact with or impact mother whales murmuring quietly to their babies to keep them close. Because whales don't have arms, they can't hold their babies. So they keep in touch with little sounds, and when that's interrupted, they can get separated. And then I learned the more I learned, the more I learned, you know, and so the more I learned. There's a fish in this part of the world called the plainfin midshipman, and it is a very loud fish. Every spring, it will come up on the shore. Not. Not on the shore, but, like, right at the shore, and it will hum for a mate. And if you listen to it, you can actually hear it with a hydrophone, sometimes even above the water. And I was lucky enough to hear these fish a few years ago, and I was just hooked. I was like, okay, I have to learn everything about how this sound works, about how these fish are making it. And so that. That was. I just took off.
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Koosha Navadar
Listeners, we're talking about the book sing, like, how sound rules life underwater. We're here with the author Amarena King, and I understand you've recorded some of a sound that I'd like to play. I know you've brought us a piece of tape from Cape Cod that sounds like cusk eels and toadfish. What sounds they make. Tell us what we're about to hear.
- [06:19]
Amarena Kingdon
Okay. So I embarked on a quest to actually listen to fish. So I got myself a little dip hydrophone, which is essentially like a cord with a little microphone on the end that can hear sound underwater. And I set out wherever I went, reporting wherever I went, I would put the hydrophone in the water and just see what I could hear. And I could not, for the life of me, listen to fish. They're. They're difficult to hear sometimes. Like, a lot of the time, they have to be in the right season. You have to be in the right cove or the right bay or they. They can be tricky. And so I was on Cape Cod, and this was like, a bright, sunny day. There was probably, like, 30, 40 boats in a really narrow waterway. There was like, you know, kids with ice cream and parents and, like, you know, sun and. And everybody was having a fantastic time. You might. You would believe it if you saw JFK over there. Like, it was just very, very fancy. Cape Cod. Amazing summer day, right? And so I am. I rented a paddle board on the Bass river in West Dennis, or near West Dennis. And I was just basically drifting down this waterway with a hydrophone, very precariously, now that I'm thinking about it, I really should have been safer. But, yeah, and. And basically, there's boats passing me, and then I put the hydrophone in the water. And because it was spring, and these are, like, coastal estuary waterways, there's all these fish in the water that are trying to find each other to mate. And one of the things about fish is that they use sound to mate for a very, very good reason. And I apologize in advance if this is a little bit tmi, but when fish mate, they don't really. They have to release their gametes together simultaneously. Because if it's in the water and you need them to mix, you need to do it pretty much at the same time. And so a lot of fish will use sound to either find each other or coordinate. Coordinate their mating dance. And so they don't really have a choice because sound is the only way to find each other. So I'm listening to these fish that are trying to mate underwater while I am drifting down the Bass river. And above it is like summer Americana wonderfulness. And then below the water is fish trying to find each other.
- [08:32]
Koosha Navadar
I just want to point out we are not talking about the birds and the bees. We are talking about kuskiels and toadfish, which is wonderful. That's a new take on a wonderful subject. You broke it on wnyc. Okay, so that's what we're listening to. Let's listen to it right now. Here it is.
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Amarena Kingdon
Yeah. So that beast is toadfish.
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Koosha Navadar
So what were you about to say as we bring that down? Go ahead.
- [09:09]
Amarena Kingdon
Just kind of how quiet it is underwater, considering that above the water was crazy and that toadfish is just calling for a mate. And that's just a boop, boop, boop, trying to find its mate.
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Koosha Navadar
So that's the bubbling sound, is the toadfish.
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Amarena Kingdon
Yeah.
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Koosha Navadar
Okay, let's listen to it again here. Here it is. So that's the toadfish right there.
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Amarena Kingdon
Yeah, that. That little sound.
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Koosha Navadar
Oh, wow.
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Amarena Kingdon
Yep. He's calling for a mate. And I think that clip. Actually, I'm not sure if you can skip ahead to about 45 seconds, but there's a cusp. Eel in there as well.
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Koosha Navadar
Oh, I. So we've got. We have it just ending here, but maybe we can pull it up later for 45 seconds later on it. If you listen closely, I bet you can hear it saying, hey, baby. Hey, baby. Hey.
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Amarena Kingdon
I mean, if you think about it, if you're a fish, like in. In the water, it's very murky, right? Like, it was sandy water. I put my hand in and I couldn't see my hand below the surface. It's a. A lot of coastal waters are murky. And so if you're trying to find a mate to, you know, perpetuate your. Whatever, your fish genes, then, yeah, you're going to have to find them with sound because you're not going to see them and you're not going to touch them unless you're very, very lucky and you're probably not going to taste them. And as for scent, I mean, that does work on a lower, smaller time or smaller space scale, but. Yeah.
- [10:35]
Koosha Navadar
And your last two chapters take a close look at human sounds and how they impact the marine soundscape and what you call the, quote, global growl caused by the shipping industry. How does that global growl, or I guess how might it impact the sensory experiences of an individual creature? And you know, can you translate that to the impact on the ecosystem?
- [10:56]
Amarena Kingdon
Yeah, well, the global growl is definitely right because we've. Shipping noise permeates pretty much every corner of the ocean. It's been recorded at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. And that's just because, you know, we, we ship a lot of stuff, shipping lanes around the, around the world and they operate 247 and they. Shipping noise, if you're right near a ship, it could be, you know, very, very harmful just in terms of, you know, hurting your, hurting your actual ears or hurting your sensory hair cells, depending on what animal you are. But when you're talking about shipping, you're often talking about more of a reduction in what scientists consider to be things like communication space or listening space. So, for example, if you are a whale that relies on sound to keep in touch with your family, a shipping lane can reduce the space over which you can keep in touch with your family. So rather than hearing them over 10km, you can only hear them over 3km. Same kind of goes for an animal that's listening for predators. If you're listening for the sounds of whales or seals that might be trying to eat you, you can hear it for a shorter distance if there's shipping noise in the area. Um, and the other thing that can happen when you have chronic noise, as anybody who's lived near a highway can probably tell you, I mean, this is true above the water too. We're just starting to understand how chronic noise can affect human health too. So we're, you know, asking questions about what it means for animals is, is really relevant, I think, right now to.
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Koosha Navadar
Anyone who lives in New York City, in fact.
- [12:29]
Amarena Kingdon
Oh my gosh. Yeah, well, I, I'm, I live beside an ambulance route and I'm sure that that's taken a little bit of time off my. Anyways. But yeah, it's. The other thing that tends to happen is you have to call louder and more often sometimes in order to get your message across, not to get too esoteric. But there's the whole science of communication and signal design and that sort of thing, which is really fascinating. If you want to send a signal a long way, for instance, it's best if it's kind of lower and it's very simple and it can be repeated. And there's all these sorts of things that you can learn about animal signal design. If you're a, an animal that's making complex signals that need to be understood at the other end, like the way that we know a lot of marine mammals do, and you have, you know, you have a shipping lane or something like that, that's going to mean that you have to maybe put more effort into calling more often or calling louder. It's going to change your calling behavior. And we don't know what that means for an animal. It might eat into your hunting time. If you have to spend time running away from ships or naval sonar or something. We, you know, animals don't have fridges, right? Like they don't have storage. If you want to eat today, you have to hunt today. And so, you know, that's a big thing too.
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Koosha Navadar
So if you're thinking about. Because we're talking about the impact on the ecosystem, right? This like systemic. Systemic impact. So what avenues of study does sound open up for scientists who are trying to fill in those gaps in our knowledge that you're describing?
- [14:00]
Amarena Kingdon
Well, that's actually really exciting. And I found some, a lot of good reason for optimism in this, actually. Thank goodness, which I was, I was happy. But what I found is that a lot of people who are not acousticians or not sound scientists are actually incorporating sound just into their studies of ecosystems, which is really cool. Here in British Columbia, there's people that are studying kelp forests and kelp forest ecology, and they're starting to look at how kelp forests can absorb and dampen noise for the animals that live inside them. Coral reef scientists are looking at the study of how sound moves through coral reefs. Basically, people are starting to include sound as a sort of aspect of the ecosystem that they haven't looked at before, which is really amazing because that means it brings an even deeper understanding of how sound works with everything else to make an animal's life the way that it is, which is great. Something else that's really interesting too is that in many cases it's easier and quicker to monitor the sounds of an ecosystem than it is to go out and do a lot of expensive and complicated in person monitoring. Now that's not to say that it doesn't solve everything. There's some things that you can tell from a sound that you really need somebody to be there and monitoring. For example, you can tell that a certain species is there, but you can't count how many of that species are there. But if you're in a situation where you have limited resources and you need to monitor, say, this marine protected area, or you want to monitor this wind farm construction site or something, and you don't have the time or the manpower to have an extensive monitoring situation going on, you can record the sounds and monitor the sounds of the ecosystem and learn a remarkable amount from it. And so I think there's a lot of applications of sound underwater now that we know how central it is and how critical it is, where it can help us understand additional aspects of an ecosystem that maybe we just didn't understand before. And it can also give us some insight into how we can keep tabs on ecosystems that maybe we never could before, which is fascinating. And the last thing I'll say about that is that there are parts of the ocean that we are just starting to poke our nose into. For better or for worse. There's the Arctic. As we all know, climate change is accelerating and sea ice is retreating. And there's every reason to believe that industry is going to be increasing in the Arctic waters, unfortunately, or fortunately. And so understanding the soundscapes of the Arctic Ocean before we intrude, there is something that I think is absolutely critical. And another area that we're just starting to look at is the deep sea and prospecting for deep sea metals in the Pacific and around the world. Yeah. Using sound as a tool of inquiry here is really useful.
- [16:58]
Alison Stewart
That was Koosha Navadar's conversation with Amarena Kingdom, author of Sing Like a How Sound Rules Life Underwater. After a break, we'll hear Koosha's conversation with speechwriter Riley Roberts about commencement speeches and crafting words to inspire. Stick around.
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Unknown
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