To celebrate World Ocean Day, Euan Paterson, communications and media officer at SAMS, provides insights into work to gather underwater audio data, including the songs, calls and whistles of marine mammals.
We humans are simply fascinated with marine mammals.
Perhaps it’s their size, the distances they can travel or that some can communicate across an entire ocean. Maybe it’s because despite those things, we hardly get to see them at all.
After all, species such as whales and dolphins spend the vast majority of time below the water surface and out of sight.
But what if, instead of trying to see more, we listened better?
Scientists at SAMS specialise in a technique known as passive acoustic monitoring, which involves positioning hydrophones (underwater recorders) on the seabed and collecting audio data, including the songs, calls and whistles of marine mammals.
On recovering these hydrophones, the researchers gather terabytes of data and have to identify which sounds have been made by which species. This helps them to better understand marine mammal movements, population size and behaviours.
Such monitoring will be crucial as scientists seek to provide evidence for a number of policy and conservation decisions, including Marine Protected Area designation and management, marine renewable energy developments, fishing, aquaculture and shipping.
It is also important for the conservation of marine mammals to understand how climate change may be affecting their migrations and feeding opportunities.
Some species are so elusive that scientists need to rely on sounds to even estimate their population size.
In the case of the Atlantic white-sided dolphin, the species is so poorly understood in science that there are few accurate estimates on population size, although the dolphin is hunted in the Faroe Islands. Unlike the better-known common and bottlenose dolphins, it prefers the deep ocean to coastal waters and is rarely seen by humans, making it more difficult to study.
Scientists at SAMS have been examining recordings of Atlantic white sided dolphins to describe its vocal behaviour – or acoustic repertoire – in literature for the first time. From that foundation of knowledge, the marine science community will be able to better study this secretive cetacean.
But, while there are certain sounds that are unmistakably attributed to certain species, there are many sounds that can remain a mystery. The development at pace of artificial intelligence, however, is helping to fill the gaps. Passive acoustic monitoring scientists can use existing sounds to develop algorithms and effectively ‘train’ AI systems to do a lot of the identification – the proverbial heavy lifting – for them. This frees up time to work on identifying sounds that are less familiar.
On World Ocean Day (today), SAMS scientists have joined around 150 researchers across the world in deploying recording equipment as part of the World Ocean Passive Acoustic Monitoring project. It is the first ever global experiment to record the underwater sounds of animals in our ocean, lakes and rivers.
The aim is to gain a better understanding of the distribution of sound levels and types of sound in those areas around the world that occur at the same time. The recordings will also identify any man-made sounds, revealing our potential impact on the underwater environment.
A video on the fieldwork can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/834131804
Meanwhile, SAMS has this week launched its #WhaleTalk campaign with the aim of promoting SAMS’ expertise in passive acoustic monitoring.
As part of #WhaleTalk, SAMS will organise a series of events throughout the remainder of 2023 and is this week launching its new Ocean Explorer podcast with a first episode on underwater sounds. You can listen to and download first episode here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1080152
To keep up to date with our #WhaleTalk events, keep an eye on the hashtag across social media and sign up for our Ocean Explorer Update newsletter https://www.sams.ac.uk/ocean-explorer-update
To find out more about studying marine science at UHI, visit www.uhi.ac.uk/courses
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