Ologies with Alie Ward - Acoustic Ecology (NATURE RECORDINGS) with Eddie Game

Episode Date: May 5, 2022

Insects humming. Birds squawking. Chainsaws buzzing? What does the rainforest sound like? Or the oceans outside of port cities? Is the world getting louder? And what can recording devices detect that our ears – especially mine, Alie’s – can’t? Acoustic Ecologist Dr. Eddie Game of the Nature Conservancy has asked conservation questions over decades of work in 20 countries, and even though his microphone for this interview sucked, his stories and wisdom are a pleasure to hear. Also: is it okay to talk to owls? How much of timber harvesting is legal? And how do communities come together to protect the lands around them? Also: the most elusive and coolest midnight parrot. Dr. Eddie Game is on TwitterA donation was made this week to The Nature ConservancySponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, we just won the 2022 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 thisologist got his PhD in marine science from the University of Queensland and has worked in conservation in over 20 countries, from snow leopard tracking in Mongolia to big grass munchers in 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

bio acoustics 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 with a 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 Jared spruced it up in post. We boosted his sound. So what? It's worth a listen anyway. All the other episodes had better sound. Okay. Real quick, just a thanks to everyone who submitted questions via patreon.com slash oligies.

Barrier to entry is $1 a month, hop aboard. Thanks to everyone who tells friends about oligies, who leaves a review knowing that I read them all, such as one that Emily left a few days ago that read, I got to say, lady, I hated science before I listened to your podcast. Now I can't get enough. Emily, welcome to 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 Dr. Eddie Gaine. Hi, is this Dr. Gaine? Okay, Dr. Gaine, sounds like a good 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 Gaine, he here. And where am I talking to you from? Where are you beaming in from? I'm talking from Brisbane, Australia. Oh, I hope that it is a reasonable time there. Oh, yeah.

It's quarter past nine in the morning, so it's halfway through my work day. Do you have to get up 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, 14 and a half years, 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. You know, and I don't think many people knew it was an ology until probably only five or six years ago. It really started taking off sort of, you'd have whispers of it, and there were some people in California and some people in Italy doing it, but now, you know, 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 news streams of data, like when we first started getting satellite images of Earth, it was completely transformational in the sort of science we can do and the insights we could get into the planet. If you're like, was that in 1992 or like 1874, I got you. So the first images humans took from space were by the U.S. in the mid 1940s.

So see right after the Second World War. And it's gotten better since those space blurs, but in 1999, the U.S. and Japan launched a group project which was public domain images via the Aster imaging system. The point is like a rocket with an insta-matic 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 that you made

thousands and thousands of dollars to get a decent microphone and people realized two things. One is that you can do a lot with cheaper microphones and also good quality microphones are getting much cheaper and companies starting to make good sort of field for purpose things and because people were able to put out more microphones really means they can sort of start asking different questions that wasn't possible in the past. 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 you started having computer scientists being willing to engage

on this as a topic, but once we started getting computing science engineers involved, that really helped too. Just a side note, so that programming language she 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. So go get it, you dirty little nerds. And what about you? Were you an ecologist first who learned to use acoustic equipment

or did you always have an ear for music and sound recording and kind of blended them together? No, definitely the ecologist. I was a marine ecologist originally, marine biologist and lived in fisheries and then came, did all sorts of things at the Nature Conservancy and I was an editor of a journal and I started seeing manuscripts and research coming out, little bits of it on acoustic ecology and I realized quite early on, I was like, wow, this could help solve a problem we have, particularly in Papua New Guinea, for surveying in these rainforests, but it's really hard for people to know what's happening there because it's so hard to find experts who know what they're talking about, you know, a lot of our traditional

surveying methods wouldn't work and so that's what got me 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 at so many university days at concerts and I'm sure it's no value of me buying an expensive stereo anymore. So no, it's not through any kind of musicality of my own that I got involved in this. You mentioned that you were a marine scientist too. Like, does acoustic ecology work, obviously, terrestrial and oceanic applications, but how different is the equipment?

Oh, good question. Really different. But you know, the marine side of things actually was where acoustic ecology resided for many years. Acoustic ecology, people associate it for many decades even with listening to whales and dolphins, principally, because that was a really good way to survey them and put down these hydrophones. Just a quick what's what. So a hydrophone is specifically designed to pick up underwater noise because sound travels 4.3 times faster in water than it does in air. And the pressure of a sound wave in water is 60 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. Yeah, that's what started to really expand in the sort of terrestrial, the land space. So when that went back to the freshwater or marine space and to the side of the 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, you know, things are really, seem really promising. And you mentioned something about the signatures of animals. What kinds of noises are you listening

for? I mean, I know that we're all thinking like bird calls, 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 at insects, insects, insects vocalize at all sorts of different frequencies at all kinds of times of day. And that's something we can begin to pick. Sometimes they're really sort of characteristic. Sometimes they're completely unknown. But then you also have amphibians, frogs, obviously, mammals, birds, bats. I guess bats are another good thing

to mention because bats were also one of those animals that people had continued to, to use acoustic ecology to survey just because it's hard to see bats, but it's actually hard to hear them. But if you put out these sort of ultrasonic recorders, they record at very high frequencies, you can hear bats. And there's a bit of a 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 bats, it's not so good for capturing the kind of 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 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz. And bats

are up there just cute in their little cuties in the range of 12 kilohertz to 160 kilohertz. That is 140 kilohertz 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 slow down. 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 History Museum of Agilist County in my yard. And 15 minutes before this call, Miguel Ordinana, 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 is not like three individual bats who just hang out. They were looking for people and I emailed them within a millisecond. 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. The problem is that the frequency of their frequency calls is so fast, you have to have a microphone that can record incredibly fast to be able to capture that. And that means that the sort of longer, slower sound

ways of lower frequencies just tend to get a bit blurry in there. So it's not really good for distinguishing between different frequencies for that lower and the right. 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 a bat 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 over the map. So we're, I guess, most of the frequencies that we're listening to, like human hearing can hear, there's a best case scenario from 20 hertz up to 20

kilohertz, 20,000 hertz. And that's actually the range that most animals vocalizing. Now, the very, very kind of low end of that range, you do get some some amphibians down there quite local, some mammals, and there are some birds in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, these amazing birds called cassowaries. Kind of big prehistoric thing, 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 out in those three, you know, something around three kilohertz. And that's, that's

really 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 at slightly higher frequencies, but you certainly get a lot of insects at higher frequencies. There's lots of insects vocalizing up about 10 kilohertz with 10 kilohertz, even at the 20. Okay, but what does 10 kilohertz or 15 kilohertz or 20 kilohertz sound like? Also, if you were like, Oh, how embarrassing, you messed up and some sound effects were missing. Congratulations, you're me. As Jared and I were editing this, I kept telling him that the 15 and the 20 kilohertz

sound effects were missing. And that's when I read his face and I learned that any sound above 11 kilohertz means nothing to my ears. They're gone. So thanks past me for attending warehouse parties in 2007 with shitty DJs. 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, like, who's, who's there or who's making sound. But what is all of the sound telling us about the health of the environment? The only thing 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 there's a

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 be 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 if you have a look, you take a recording and see how many frequencies are full, how many of those spaces are occupied, to indicate how healthy it is. And that what we are seeing really clearly in our data, and this gets to kind of how we use it,

is as environments get degraded, as we use them, we start seeing gaps open up in that acoustic space. And 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, let's 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 it to all sorts of questions that are really useful

for a conservation organization like the Nature Conservancy. So imagine a walkie-talkie that has a bunch of different channels, and different organisms evolved to occupy those different channels. And when acoustic ecologists run the data, and suddenly start to find silence 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 and 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 question. So where we started this for us, this is a group of genius in Papua New Guinea,

and New Guinea 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 have 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 like vast forest tracks or national parks, you've got a lot 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 to grow enough food to live, harvest enough trees to build their houses, and you're 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 forest 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, you know, 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 species monitoring? Yeah, that's a good question. So I guess there's 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 to poaching is whether you can hear things like gunshots or, you know, some illegal harbors, bulldozers, chainsaw, things like that. They're very distinctive sounds on recordings, partly because they're also very low frequency 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 city, you know, be able to pick up a sound to go and respond in real time. That's tricky, especially as so many of the places where this is happening. I don't have kind of reliable network connection. So in a sort of ideal situation, you could set up a microphone that was sending a signal back and someone would go out immediately, say, oh, there's a gunshot. 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 burden of just maintaining things and being out there and 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 deter 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 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 nearly as specialist as what a lot of

previous biodiversity surveys were. So in most of our projects, it's actually local communities that go out and do the monitoring. Yeah, you know, we're certainly helping a great deal in terms of it's a coordinate that the processing and analysis of that data 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 that and we're thinking through what the implications are. But in terms of going out and doing this or placing microphones, that's something that lots of people can get involved in. So Dr. Game 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 15 to 30% of timber plucked without permits. And in Indonesia, for example, that rate just goes up to over 80%. 80% of the deforestation 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 ecologists 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 there a Wi-Fi? Oh, good questions. Do you know there was a bit of a movement for a while on these old cell phones? Everyone pretty much walked away from that in the end, just because the reliability is such an issue. You know, when you put the sort of environment as you want to do this sampling, it's tough on gear and it's certainly tough on cell phones. So mostly for our gear now, we're using kind of purpose built gear that's pretty rugged and it's fairly basic in essence. So you know, imagine kind of a little pelican case, a little sort of rugged box could be anything. We

like, you know, gear to have the microphones on the bottom. Some people have their microphones sort of sticking out the side, but we've got the birds tend to sit on them, things fall on them. So I like my microphones at the bottom of the box. Funny stuff happens in the field all the time and there's always a lot of troubles. We're either doing this recordings in Borneo, where we had microphones out for a few work, putting them out for a few months at a time, but taking regular recordings often for full days and then 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 these are pretty rugged things. And what we realized had happened in the end is we

strapped the microphones and their housing so tightly to the trees. And because it's the rain forest, these trees were growing so fast that they had grown over those three months enough to just bend the metal back plate ever so slightly and crack the seal open. So yeah, so we realized you've got to, even though we were attaching them with kind of cloth straps, that we'd put them on really tight, you know, this is not sort of advantageous to put them on too tight because you need to allow 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.

You know what, we have not. Maybe there's sort of places where we're here. We've had trees fall on them and they get broken. We've had often, you know, forest rats and eat the, you know, the foam, the foam dampening around the outside of the microphone. They like that. So often you come back and all you can see is the kind of bare steel on the microphone. It's okay. You still get it. You still get this data out of it. But most of the work that I've been involved in has been in fairly remote areas and on lands managed by communities or forestry companies and bear with the blessing of the community or the company. What about just noise pollution in general? Speaking of humans, how much louder is earth

getting? Or is it getting quieter because we're losing species? Good question. I think it's overall it's getting quiet. So Really? Yeah. Yeah. In quite a meaningful way. That'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, like we call them the dawn chorus. You also have the dusk chorus at the end of the day. And they're really 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 those quipuscular moments at the end of the day. And you also, it's a moment of change over between the nighttime species, nocturnal species and daytime species. So you just have these, usually when you look at a spectrogram, a chart of sound energy to see a huge peak in those morning and evening sessions. And what we see is as the environments are getting degraded, just so consistently, you see those peaks diminishing, the more damage you do, the more heavily we use environments, they 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 doubt there's probably some issues there. But overall, I think that it's 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 beep beep. And that's, that's scarier and sadder than I thought. Yeah, it is sad. And yeah, and we think it was a sad realization, but we still haven't seen that too, just just how consistent that is and just how, how striking that is. And it's how different

it is to, yeah, you're at 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 blows people away if they ever get the chance to experience is the amount of sound that you hear in really healthy forests, especially if you just 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, now you can hear, I mean, it's just staggering. And that, 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 decibel cut off just so we are not getting over,

we don't have an idea of basically how far away things are going. Whether it's really loud and not often depends on whether you have a couple of characteristic animals close by cicadas or really loud, some, some really loud birds, they can be genuinely noisy. So if you listened 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 100 decibels, which is about the volume of an ambulance siren, or 20 decibels louder than a Slayer concert. Is there anything more metal than that? There is. And it's a bird called the screaming piha, which has been recorded at 116 decibels. But boy, howdy, hot damn, hold the phone. Something is louder than a

South American screaming piha. The Northeast Amazonian white bellbird just busts into the tree party and announces its presence at 120 decibels. White bellbird, 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 decibels. It's just that I guess you 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. You know, if we just listen to our hearing tends to get blown away by those loud animals, but the microphone and the data and

the computer doesn't say, you know, if you have a really loud animal calling, it's still calling how to discreet set of frequencies. So it's the distinct species calls and the bigger trends that they're looking for. And by looking, I mean listening, but also looking. So not just listen, but also look at them on the screen on the spectrogram and try and separate individual calls. And even if we don't know what species it is, we can still identify, oh, hang on, that's something else calling. There's a really good relationship between the number of animals calling and the overall saturation. And what that means is that you kind of no longer need to count 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 will 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 say, oh, yeah, you know, there's 200 different animals calling in this half an hour or whatever it might be. That's a great, 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 can 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 tromping around the rainforest to make a really meaningful contribution here. In fact, we need all the people that are better programs 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, 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 so want to work on this. Like, where are the jobs? Oh, good question. So, you know, there's a bunch of different university groups, I guess, now researchers 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, some research groups

have sort of made that their specialty. 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 their thing. They've been wonderful partners for us. Yeah, we had a listener, Alex Ertman 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, it is. I just mean, I really think there's going to be so many more of these. It's already one of those things that I'm seeing that kind of for profit environment space get into too. So

those people that are responsible for doing environmental impact assessments or environmental monitoring, you know, that might be associated with natural resource extraction industries. If you run a mining company or a forestry company or something like that, you usually need to pay someone to help do some of this environmental monitoring. Almost all of those firms doing that are now like, Oh, wow, okay, I got to be have a sort of acoustic ecology side of things because it's such a useful tool for us. So take the number of jobs in this space, I'm going to really grow to and not just be in that research space with 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, one of the challenges with lots of environmental monitoring in the past is that it relies on who's doing the counting, 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 that would be the same when we went to the forest, we hear different things and see different things. But microphones, if they calibrate the same here, the same thing, no matter if you put it out or if I put it

out, there's actually a chance to get some kind of more, more robust, more pure data in this way that that should alleviate some of those ethical concerns. What, you know, what a mining company does with that information and what their government does, what does it appear that people we shouldn't do with that information can 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 extracting industries. Can I ask you some questions from listeners? Go for it.

Okay. And we'll just lightning around. We'll go through as many as we can. How does that sound? Go for it. You know what? Let's go for it. But first, let's make it rain forest on a worthy charity this week. So Dr. Eddie Gaines said to send 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 400 scientists to impact conservation in 76 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.org and we'll be making a donation in Eddie's name. Thanks to

sponsors of oligies. Okay. You hollered questions via Patreon and we listened. So I got to say, Eddie says that you all have really good questions. So every time he seems impressed with a question, just feel free to maybe do a very, very tiny, imperceptible, but dance that only you know about. Here we go. Okay. So Jesse and Jeswan were both interested in, 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? That's such a good question. You know, I don't think there is that there has 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 analyzed sounds. And I was at a meeting five or say four or five years ago where there was sort of a big community of acoustic ecologists around the world. That was all anyone talked about was do we need to stand out as ways that we can all be talking about the same thing and doing the same thing. My sense of the time was it was just, just kind of too early for that. That would be cutting off a lot of creativity. One of the people are still just figuring out interesting stuff to do. And it was kind of growing every day. So my guess is we'll get to a point where there is some more standard language, but we're not there yet.

Still emerging. We're listening for more details on that. I think that's one of the cool things about acoustic. I still feel that people say, oh, I've got a good idea about how we should talk about sound or use sound and people are really receptive at the moment. Yeah, that's so good. 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 Monikowski both asked, are there animals that people have heard but not seen before?

Good question. There probably is. The ones that 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 deserts of Australia, something called a night parrot. It's almost like a mythical bird that had been only seen a couple of times by reliable descriptions that we knew was there. And we started hearing it. Hear that bell? That is the sound of a night parrot. People started putting out microphones and recording it. It still took a long time to find it, but we knew it was there in some of these remote desert areas of Australia because

we're hearing it. There's quite a few cases like that where we're using sound to find the presence of animals that then 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 codenames 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 2013 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 birder on the side, by the way? You know, I'm not at all. And in fact, I did my graduate study in a lab that was completely full of birders. So I think I actually hardly purged 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 alhoot, but you don't see it, some people count that, some people don't. But if you're an ecologist, you count that, right? Totally. And you know, I work with a great many birds and many of my close acoustic collaborators are very keen birders. There's a lot of enthusiasm 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 bird, you could do many podcasts on the ethics of different birds that you know, whether you're allowed 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 Spex 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 interspecies conversations? Elijah wants to know. So yeah, have you heard anything in acoustic ecology about whether or not calling to an animal to get it to call back is, is okay? Yeah, that's good. Because I mean, it's something that's worth considering the ethics of, I think whatever you do research or do a study that would involve a play back, that is a good thing that

that goes through some sort of ethics consideration that we get at that stage. Now, I said, I think there's a lot of utilities that 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 amazing thing for listeners to get just to Google and they should Google the corroboree frog in Australia. And it's really difficult to see a small corroboree 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 the moment you hear these callbacks. Hey, frog.

So 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, likely to be any kind of behavioral implications to the animals of doing that. And it's funny, we were trying to understand how sound moved through the environment in Borneo, because one of the things that we came to realise is that microphones hear different, different distances from them, depending on how dense the environment is, kind of whether you're on a 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 could hear so that we were comparing each microphone the same. So we climbed to the top of a tree and we were, we were

pretending to be gibbons. So we strapped a big speaker to the top of a tree and play these gibbon sounds. We had microphones at different distances and we were seeing how strong the gibbon signal was there, because we wanted to use it to survey gibbons, and gibbons are an amazing creature. That's sort of their most iconic sound of the Borneo rainforest. But we were just doing this to record the artificial gibbon sound, or the plate that comes out. But of course, all the gibbons in the neighbourhoods are like, who's this new sort of gibbons here? What are you doing here? And I came over and started calling and saying, hey, this is our pet. You should get out of here. Wow.

But yeah, the gibbons probably didn't appreciate suddenly hearing a bunch of new gibbons in their territory. They're like, do you mind? 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 got to throw

wings at a rival, and it's just you there. It's 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 Ximo, Garvies, Carly V, Shelby Reardon, Ewen Monroe, Kelly The Nature Nerd, and Beth Beluz, for some question asker. In Beth's words, what's the biggest surprise you've experienced when listening back to a recording? Or what are just some of the weirdest, eeriest sounds that you've heard? Good question. Do you know, this is going to sound funny, but that one of the 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 wonderful sounds, but then occasionally you 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, you're listening and sort of a very kind of, it's a very kind of a cute sound you hear of the other coming in and landing on the microphone and then going off again, that sort of never ceases to be a little bit eerie. Are you ever tempted to sample and make some tracks? Like Spex Owl asked if you're interested in the work of Chris Watson, who makes nature sounds into Omegard music. Are you ever, this would

make a pretty good beat. And do you know what, and it is in some of our sounds have been used in lots of different ways too. So some of our recordings from Papua New Guinea got turned into a piece of orchestral music, actually, for a present concert at one point. And a close colleague of mine has a pretty Omegard group that involves electronic music and a double bass and fish sounds. They're recordings that they've taken in rivers. It's very cool. We even did a live performance once, it was pretty entertaining. What is it called?

Oh, Simon Linky is the person is the guy who set it up. He's at Griffith University in Australia. So you can look up here. I don't think the group actually had a name, but they performed at a festival, the wonderful sort of live mixing of fish sound recordings taken from their acoustic ecology work and electronic and double bass. I mentioned fish sounds. And we had some questions about COVID and whales. 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 Clark and Aylph Holmes also asked

about underwater noise because you mentioned that it's getting quieter on land, but are things different in the ocean? Lots of good questions there. And, you know, I'm probably not best place to say to speak a lot to what happened in that kind of COVID shutdown and the response he saw in the North Atlantic. But certainly we know that the 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 sounds. And I think I said earlier that, you know, these low frequency sounds travel so far and that's especially true in water. The diesel engine of a

ship is one of the lowest frequency sounds you hear. And so the extent of that pollution is extraordinary. One of the most amazing sonic experiences I've ever listened to was a woman here in Australia called Leah Barkley. 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 Great Barrier Reef. And as you get closer to the cities that have been ports, Sydney, things like that, it just, the sand, even when you're tens, hundreds of kilometres away, you just hear this sort of grumbling sound.

It's like a growing, growing into a sort of takes over the entire soundscape and then fades away again as the drifting microphones were passed these cities. Extraordinary experience. It gave me such an insight into just how altered that sonic environment is in the marine space. And does that interfere with echolocation? Maria Manser wanted to know our 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, good question. I mean, I think there is quite a lot of evidence supporting the idea that those human sort of anthropogenic sounds and say that they do interfere with the ability of

whales and dolphins to communicate. And what's probably less clear is how that manifests in terms of behavioural changes. But I think there's definitely an impact. One of the things we're learning when I sit 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 cue to find them, you know, 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 baby fish larvae are drifting around the ocean just looking for some slice of

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 reefs get degraded either through coral bleaching, you know, 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 happening on land, you're just losing some of the focalizing diversity from those environments. And that is probably having a bigger impact than we realize on overall ecology of the system and 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 chiroptrologist, asked if any animals use infrared sound 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. I mean, this, I guess, if you go back to the very early ideas of how sound and embolders communication, probably the earlier versions were just things that vibrations that we felt vibrations that we made, and we felt this vibration. It's actually a book recently out by an American author, David Haskell, 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. 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 are 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 world? 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. 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 used for Tyrannosaurus, things like Jurassic Park.

Are a combination of really like slow down baby elephant trumpets and lion roars, because it induces the response that they want the Tyrannosaurus to reduce in us. I wonder what they actually sounded like, but they were like, hi. Well, the reptiles hear differently. And so, they certainly were able to make sound probably quite different. The sounds that we think are sort of characteristic to our current hearing in the way we hear. Yeah, I mean, just based on how a chicken sounds, not too scared. Exactly.

Last listener question. One sent in from Celeste, 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, any hope? Any, any way that you deal with things emotionally? Yeah, you know, it is a good question. And it's something that I have to deal with really quickly. And you know, what what gives me hope is what how thriving I see even small patches of rainforest, 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 biodiversity can be protected in them. One of the places I've been lucky to work enough in is in Borneo. And there's this one patch of forests, it's not particularly big. I mean, I guess it's certainly decent size by sort of built up stands for 50,000 acres or so. When you look at a map, it seems tiny, but when it's dense rainforest, it's hard to walk across. And it wasn't that long ago that we rediscovered species of primate, even a langer, a monkey that was thought to be extinct, that has a trip of them in this area. And so I think, well, you know, if you go places like this, and you see what has been left intact, you know, there's hope that we're not going to wreck it all. And if we could just find a way to

kind of sort of stop the hemorrhaging of these forests, which I really do think is going to happen. And they just think that's going to be untenable. And then a lot of people are starting to realize that lots of levels then, you know, that nature will come back. Also, if you listen closely, you can hear morning birds just chirping 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. Sometimes it's pretty good. I mean, they're the sort of people

often that are the people that are collecting the atmos for, for these recordings, they're often people that go into this kind of sound recording and sound ecology. So we've been lucky in sort of the ecology space to recruit people who are already interested in rainforest sound recordings. Now, what we often don't have is the way to play it back to ourselves, that can mimic an actual rainforest environment, because you need to have, you know, a whole pile of different speakers, there's sort of almost 360 degrees of immersion and, and the ability to have speakers that can really reflect those different frequencies. So it's probably less about the, actually what the recording is and 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 bugs and birds. What about those apps that have gentle rainfall or bird sounds? I always want to know, come down there, record your own. Do you know what I'm saying? I guess you hear a lot of rain when you're in the rainforest. There's no, it's one of the sort of bane of our recordings is filtering out rain. But you know, I did not find rain, like healthy rainforest is not relaxing to listen to. Like when you're listening to that like gentle rainforest sounds, that's like either, you know, to the middle of a day when things are the quietest and just hearing a little bit of sort of gentle sound every now and again. But if

you're actually listening to a rainforest, that's like a peak activity. Like, oh, yeah, I don't think anyone would describe it. It's kind of calming. Well, you know, you mentioned that you're an early riser. Do you enjoy the sound of birdsong as, you know, it becomes dawn as the sun comes out? Yeah, I think it's, you know, joy being in nature, that space it is. It's a time when, when nature's really alive. And it is also often a time before people get up and start moving around. So I think there's something special 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, I'm going to totally watch this, this quote, but you know, I remember when I said once, when I've been here, Wilson, you know, if you live in, 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 things, oh, wow, you know, wow, we've given that a hiding. And that's probably the toughest part. I mean, I'm lucky because you get to sort of get up each morning and try and do something about it. But it's tough also seeing that. And I imagine that's true for many, many different professions that work in that kind of I don't know, crisis response to 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 1800s. 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 interact with natural world and hoping we can continue that for other people. But you know, sort of on a day to day basis, I just also love the people that are involved in the conservation space in the world, you know, 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 is. And you know, acoustic is a great idea, because that's opened up a whole new pile of people, because we discussed who are now getting involved and new people are interested in it. So I've got to talk to a lot of people that I wouldn't have otherwise. So yeah, it tracks a great cast of people. Well, that's awesome. Thank you so much for talking to me. This has been so illuminating, illuminating and music to my ears. Hey, pleasure. I mean, thanks for it. Thanks for having the conversation.

So ask quiet ecologists, loud brazen questions, but actually, but 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 Dr. Eddie Game and the Nature Conservancy, which you can find at nature.org. A ton of links are up on my website at alleyward.com slash allergies 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 Allergies podcast Facebook group. Thanks, Shannon Feltas and Bonnie Dutch, who help out too. Thank you to every patron at patreon.com slash allergies, who supports the show and sends in questions. It's a book a month to join. Susan Hale does so much behind the scenes, including handling merch at allergiesmerch.com if you want it. Thank you, Noel Dillworth for all the scheduling and amazingness. Emily White of The Wordery makes our professional transcripts. Kayla Patton bleeps episodes, and those are both up for free on our website at alleyward.com slash allergies-extras. Every few weeks, we release a new Smologies episode, which has been trimmed of sex and filth and my swears and made

bite size for all ages. Secret Regus Thomas of Mind Gem Media makes those happen with a sis from Stephen Ray Morris. Kelly Dwyer is the website wrangler. She could make yours too. Nick Thorburn of the Band Islands made the theme music. And each week, the bird song of my dawn, Jarrett Sleeper of Mind Gem 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 Yelp. 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, 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 bye. You're the birds?