9/4/2023 0 Comments Decode synonymHe adds: “It’s not crazy that by 2100 we might have decoded dolphin language, we might be able to understand what they’re saying. Peter Tyack, an animal behaviourist at the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, jokes that he got into bio-acoustics so he could “spend less time listening to humans”. Many of his IQOE colleagues consider this a modest assessment, claiming it has the ability to revolutionise the speed of research by shaving years off data analysis, reducing human error, and allowing them to decode historic recordings from more than 50 years ago, and to make comparisons. Photograph: Su Huai/Marine Ecoacoustics and Informatics Lab The sulphide deposits formed by the vents are considered to be high-value mining sites. Recording the unique soundscape of hot spring eruptions around Japan’s Suyao Seamount and Taiwan’s Guishan Island. It would be mad to assume that has had no impact on the wildlife within it.” We are changing the soundscape in the ocean a lot. “In the last 30 years or so, we have had an explosion in underwater sound: gigantic ships, gas and oil, seabed mining, cruise ships. “Up until the 1860s, when we started industrialising the ocean, the soundscape was relatively unchanged,” Ausubel says. The researchers also want to establish sound as an essential variable in ocean science, using it to monitor species distribution, to identify new ones, and to try to spot looming climate-related disasters, such as reef bleaching, years before we can see it. The goal is to capture an acoustic baseline of different soundscapes against which change can be measured by future generations. They have looked into whether ships may be interfering with humpback whale calls off Colombia and collaborated with the US navy to study seven US marine sanctuaries, including Hawaii. The sounds help researchers measure the marine impact of noise, from coral reefs to mangrove forests, orcas to plankton, oil and gas exploration, shipping, tourism, storms and even nuclear explosions. It’s not crazy that by 2100 we might have decoded dolphin language, to understand what they’re saying Peter Tyack, animal behaviourist They use underwater microphones known as hydrophones, which make no additional noise, allowing for passive acoustic monitoring. In late April, the researchers gathered at a conference at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to discuss their findings as their decade-long collaboration draws to an end by 2025.ĭuring nearly 10 years of research costing an estimated $50m (£40m), the scientists, working across more than a dozen international organisations, universities and even military, have collected up to 4,000 series of recordings from the Atlantic, Pacific and Antarctica as well as the Australian and New Zealand coasts. Play it years, and it can digest it in minutes.” “Play a computer a few hours of snapping shrimp and it can become an expert very quickly. Then it would take me three years to listen to the tapes: it’s one thing to listen to Ed Sheeran or Mozart and spot the difference, but our ears are not attuned to the difference between waves breaking, humpback whales, ships or snapping shrimp. “In the old days, you could put a microphone in the water for a year. “Machine-learning is a major breakthrough,” says Jesse Ausubel, co-founder of the IQOE, a collaboration of scientists from the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Germany, Norway, Iceland and South Africa founded in 2015 to carry out the world’s first sound survey of the ocean. The discovery, published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, was hailed last month as groundbreaking by the International Quiet Ocean Experiment (IQOE), a small but growing group of scientists around the globe who record the sounds of the sea. Photograph: Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution Spectrograms produced from recordings of: humpback whale song in 20m (A) and 40m (B) depth waters off Okinawa, Japan different sounds from a gulf toadfish (C and D) a sooty grunter (E) spangled grunter (F) a crawling kina urchin (G) and a New Zealand paddle crab (H).
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