November 26, 2024 • 37 mins
Beneath the water lies a whole world of sound: snorts, boops, croaks, grunts. Fish, it turns out, have a lot to say, and they’ve been communicating for a long time. In this episode, we take a dive with some of the planet’s oldest vertebrates
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Special thanks to Lauren Hawkins, Miles Parsons, and Tim Lamont for many of the fish recordings. Clara Amorim and Raquel Vasconcelos recorded the Lusitanian toadfish, Herbert Tiepelt recorded the pikeperch percussionist, and Marta Bolgan provided the “unknown kwa.” Additional recordings came from more than a dozen other scientists, many of whom have contributed sounds to the website Fishsounds.
Here are the fish sounds we used in the episode:
160000_Parsons_Blackspotted croaker chorus
130000_Picciulin_Brown meager_Chorus
180000_Dilorio_Unknown_Kwa Chorus
050000_Tiepelt_Pike-perch_Scrape
070000_Stolkin_Striped Cusk-eel_Jackhammer chorus
180000_Staaterman_Toadfish_Boop-Grunt-Swoop
080000_Amorim_Lusitania Toadfish_Boatwhistle_edited
170000_RountreeR_Aplodinotus-grunniens_Drum-Call-Chorus
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Amy Martin (00:00):
The time is a few 100 million years ago. The place
is the ocean, any ocean, and youare a fish, one of the planet's
first vertebrates. You haveemerged into a very quiet world.
There's the snap and crackleshrimp and other invertebrates,
(00:22):
but usually the loudest sound inthe sea is the water itself,
washing up against your fins andscales. But then one day, you
feel it, an urge to be heard, todeclare your presence. You
squeeze the muscles around thelittle balloon inside your body,
(00:44):
your swim bladder, and a callrings out into the darkness, and
to your surprise, somebody callsback.
(01:05):
Fish were among the first marineanimals to use sound for
communication. Of course, thisability evolved gradually, not
all at once, like I was playingwith here, but still, after more
than 4 billion years of veryquiet oceans, fish began to fill
the sea with their voices. Itwas the dawn of a new era, the
(01:29):
birth of dialog, conversationsmade of clicks and thumps,
croaks and whoops and whateveryou'd call this.
Lauren Hawkins (01:41):
Ah, this is my favorite one.
Amy Martin (01:44):
Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and
this is marine biologist LaurenHawkins.
Lauren Hawkins (01:49):
So just like many other animals in the ocean
that we know of, like whales anddolphins, fish also produce
sound to communicate.
Amy Martin (01:58):
This season, we're listening to our fellow
earthlings, roughly in the orderin which they evolved. And fish
are way, way back in thattimeline, after microbes, corals
and some other invertebrates,but long before almost
everything else. And the earliera creature emerged in that
story, the wider the gap betweenthem and us, at least in our own
(02:23):
minds. But Lauren says listeningto fish communicate, even just
knowing that they can and docommunicate, starts to open up a
portal between our two worlds.
Lauren Hawkins (02:35):
Yeah, listening to fish has definitely given me
a very different view into howto value life other than human
life.
Amy Martin (02:45):
Fish are an essential food source for
everything from otters to ospreyto the dolphins we met in our
last episode, and for us humanstoo. A world without fish would
be a world in which food webscollapse and billions of people
go hungry, so it is very much inour own interest to pay
(03:06):
attention to what they have tosay. But also, fish are our
neighbors. They don't look likeus or act much like us, but that
doesn't mean they're not worthgetting to know. In fact, those
differences are a big part ofwhat makes fish conversation so
fascinating and useful. Theseanimals have stories to tell
(03:29):
about some of the parts of ourplanet that are the most
mysterious to us. In thisepisode, we're going to meet
people who are figuring out howto listen to these fish tales
and learn from them.
(04:09):
It's early spring, and I'mstanding on a frozen lake in
northern Sweden. The ice is atleast two feet thick, maybe
three, but I know there's alittle hole drilled through it
here somewhere, hiding under athin layer of crusty snow. I'm
using my cross country ski poolto find it.
Ah, there it went.
This is an ice fishing hole justbig enough to drop a line down
(04:32):
into. But I have a differentpurpose in mind.
I'm going to hook up ahydrophone, which is basically
just a microphone at the end ofa long waterproof cord, and the
microphone itself is waterproof,and I'm gonna plunk it down
there into this very cold lakeand see if we can hear any fish
or any other signs of life.
(04:55):
So what you're listening to hereis the beginning of a passive
acoustic monitoring session.That sounds kind of fancy, but
it's not. The basic idea is youtake a microphone, connect it to
a recorder, and leave it runningwhile you exit the scene.
Sigge's very curious about this.Don't eat my mittens.
My technical assistant for theday is a handsome fellow named
(05:20):
Sigge with big brown eyes, adistinctive profile and a strong
desire to chew on my gear. As Ilower the hydrophone down into
the lake, he decides to do someenergetic digging up on the
surface, and I can hear everyscratch of his paws through the
hydrophone. It's shocking howwell the sound translates down
(05:42):
into the water through thisthick layer of ice. It makes me
realize that every noise we makeup here on the surface impacts
the acoustic environment in thewater below.
You're being very helpful withthis recording Sigge.
I cover up the recorder in caseit starts to snow, clip into my
(06:04):
cross country skis and head outacross the lake. I want to get
myself and my dog as far awayfrom the microphone as I can so
none of our noise interfereswith whatever might feel like
coming in to visit. We'll checkback later to see if anyone
decided to talk.
(06:26):
Fish live almost everywhere wefind water, and that's 70% of
the surface of the earth. We areutterly dependent on these
aquatic parts of our planet, butmany of them are really hard to
access, like the dark, frigidlayer of water under a frozen
lake or the depths of the ocean.Lauren Hawkins says fish can
(06:48):
serve as emissaries from thoseplaces.
Lauren Hawkins (06:51):
We have to find ways to monitor the health of
our marine environments, andfish are very good indicators
for that.
Amy Martin (06:58):
I visited Lauren at Curtin University in Perth,
Australia, while she was workingon her PhD in fish acoustics.
Lauren Hawkins (07:05):
Acoustically, we know very little. We hear all
these sounds, and we're like,oh, yeah, that sort of is most
likely a fish because it's gotthese characteristics. But we
don't 100% know, and we alsodon't know what fish they are.
Amy Martin (07:23):
People have known that fish make sounds for a very
long time. You can see it in thenames we've given some of them:
croakers, grunts, trumpeters.But even so, Lauren says people
are often confused when shetells them she studies fish
acoustics. We don't really thinkabout fish making sounds. In
(07:44):
fact, many people, myselfincluded, don't think about fish
that much at all. Lauren says wedon't even know precisely how
many fish species exist onEarth.
Lauren Hawkins (07:56):
Yeah, and you know so much of the ocean is
still unexplored. We're stillfinding new species of fish.
Amy Martin (08:02):
That surprised me. I mean, I'm as interested in
finding extraterrestrial life asthe next person, but we don't
even know all the life forms wehave on this planet. So one of
the many uses of passiveacoustic monitoring is just
answering the basic question ofwhat animals live on Earth, and
once we know who's talking, wecan start to ask about what
(08:26):
they're saying and how they'resaying it, and why. Lauren says
there are two main ways thatfish produce sound.
Lauren Hawkins (08:33):
So the first is through sort of strumming or
stridulation of bony body parts.So that's like, you know, they
flick their fin rays againsttheir pectoral girdle and things
like that.
Amy Martin (08:46):
That's a freshwater fish known as a zander, or a
pike perch, doing this kind ofpercussive sound-making.
Lauren Hawkins (08:54):
But the second is using their swim bladder, and
they use it as sort of like aresonator. So there's like sonic
muscles that contract the swimbladder, and it produces a range
of different noises.
Amy Martin (09:11):
That is a Lusitanian toadfish making a sound that
scientists call a boat whistle,which is not the first thing
that came to mind when I heardit.
Swim bladders are internal sacksthat help fish swim, or at least
(09:35):
float. They're filled with air,and most living fish species
have them by letting air in andout of the bladders. Fish can
move up and down in the water.People have swim bladders too,
sort of. We call them lungs, andwhen we're in the water, we can
also use them to help controlour buoyancy. We are actually
(09:58):
descendants of a branch of veryearly fish that never developed
swim bladders. Instead, theyheld onto their proto lungs, and
some of them evolved into thecreatures that eventually
crawled up out of the sea andbecame the first vertebrates on
land. But that part of the storycomes way later. For millions of
(10:19):
years, fish were the mostcomplex life forms on the
planet, and likely the noisiest.When scientists record these
sounds, they give them fun nameslike sneaks, unks, snorts and
boops. This is one of myfavorites, an unknown fish
creating its own little dancerhythm using a sound that
(10:42):
someone called a kwa.
The total number of fish speciesidentified so far is around
35,000. Only about 1200 of thosehave been studied to see if they
produce sounds, but of those,more than 80% do. And that means
(11:07):
there are tons of species offish out there whose voices we
either haven't heard yet or wecan't yet identify.
Lauren Hawkins (11:14):
And even this morning, for example, I'm
looking at a new data set, and Iwas like, what is that sound?
I've never seen that soundbefore, and I was like, calling
everyone in I'm like, whalepeople. Is this a whale sound?
Like, is this a fish? Is this awhale? We don't know. So it's a
privilege to be able toeavesdrop and actually be like,
(11:35):
wow, what's, what's, what'shappening here?
Amy Martin (11:39):
If an alien civilization wanted to study
human communication, they couldscoop us up into their
spaceships and see how we reactto different stimuli. Or they
could drop microphones down intoour various habitats without
being detected, presumably, andjust listen to us being human on
(11:59):
our farms, in our villages, inbig, bustling cities. Scientists
interested in fish sounds face asimilar choice. They can pull
animals out of the water and dothings to them, often unpleasant
things to trigger responses. ButLauren says she was drawn to
passive acoustic monitoringbecause it opened up a different
(12:22):
way of getting to know thesecreatures.
Lauren Hawkins (12:25):
I wanted to be able to look at the natural
world in a way where I didn'thave to interfere with the
animals. I didn't have to get inthe water with them. I didn't
have to take things out of thewater and mess with them and
things like that.
Amy Martin (12:41):
Taking this more receptive role means we get to
hear the sounds fish make whenthey're out there in the world
being fish, which is verydifferent from anything that can
be produced in a lab.
Lauren Hawkins (12:53):
Acoustics is a really amazing way of, sort of
seeing into their private livesthat you usually wouldn't know
anything about, and give youclues as to you know how they're
going about their daily livesand what things are associated
with that.
Amy Martin (13:10):
Lauren says all kinds of surprising things crop
up.
Lauren Hawkins (13:13):
This is the sound that I found this morning.
And was like, what is this?
Amy Martin (13:18):
She pulls up the mystery sound on her computer so
we can listen to it.
Where was this recorded?
Lauren Hawkins (13:23):
This is recorded in South Australia.
Amy Martin (13:26):
And you just got this data.
Lauren Hawkins (13:28):
I just, well, I've had it for a while, but
I've just processed it, but thisis the first time I've looked at
it.
Amy Martin (13:33):
Lauren gives me her headphones and hits play. At
first, I don't hear anything,but underwater hiss.
Lauren Hawkins (13:41):
So it's very low frequency.
Amy Martin (13:44):
But then out of that noise, a signal emerges.
Oh, do it again? That's so cool.
Lauren Hawkins (13:58):
Yeah, I know right, but I have no idea what
it is.
Amy Martin (14:00):
It's a monster!
Lauren Hawkins (14:01):
It is.
Amy Martin (14:01):
You just discovered a sea monster.
Lauren Hawkins (14:05):
So you think about a lot of whales, they kind
of sound like that, but it'sjust not whaley enough.
Amy Martin (14:13):
As it turns out, it was whaley enough. She learned
later it's some sort of baleenwhale. So far, the species is
undetermined. So step one hereis identification. Who's talking
or moaning. But then thequestion becomes, what are they
trying to say? Lauren says fishuse sounds to communicate in all
(14:36):
kinds of contexts, breeding,feeding, raising the alarm.
Lauren Hawkins (14:41):
Aggregation, calling each other to come
together, essentially, yeah.
Amy Martin (14:46):
Party over here?
Lauren Hawkins (14:47):
Yeah, pretty much, yeah, or let's stay in a
group so we don't all get eaten.Who's in the middle? Dave, are
you in the middle?
Amy Martin (14:59):
These collective communications are what really
captivates Lauren. They'recalled fish choruses.
Lauren Hawkins (15:07):
Fish choruses happen when lots and lots and
lots of fish all call at thesame time, and they produce
sound continuously, and in doingso, they can dominate
soundscapes. So it's a bigacoustic event.
Amy Martin (15:27):
Fish choruses are the rock concerts of the marine
world. They can actually belouder than rock concerts or
airplanes taking off. People inMalaysia, Thailand and some
other countries, have traditionsof listening out for fish
choruses to help them figure outwhere to drop their lines and
nets. This is a chorus of eelswhich I would definitely rather
(15:50):
not encounter while I'm out fora swim.
These choruses happen all overthe world among a wide variety
of species. Some fish chorus afew times a year, in sync with
the seasons. Other kinds of fishmake choruses as part of their
daily commute between differentlayers of ocean water.
Lauren Hawkins (16:13):
What happens every evening is fish move up
from the depths up to thesurface to feed at night time.
There'll sort of be this lead upto the chorus. They start
getting a little bit closertogether, more animals start
chiming in, sort of like beinglike, oh, you're calling, I'm
(16:34):
gonna start. And it just buildsand builds and builds until
there's so many fish callingthat it just can sound like a
just white noise.
So they feed, feed, feed, feed,over through the night, and then
they drop back down around dusk,and then happens again the next
(16:58):
night. It's actually the world'slargest migration. It's huge.
Amy Martin (17:04):
The sounds of these mass migrations can tell us
things about how the fishthemselves are doing, obviously.
But not only that. A fish chorusis almost like a secret language
that can tell us other thingsgoing on in the ocean too.
Lauren Hawkins (17:18):
Things like temperature, moon phase, tidal
range, salinity. So again, therhythms of these are
intrinsically linked to how theocean is working, essentially.
So we can actually use these asindicators for what's happening
environmentally over largeareas, which is really, really
useful.
Amy Martin (17:38):
You just said moon phase. I'm like, wait a minute.
Do fish howl the mood? That isthe coolest thing ever.
Lauren Hawkins (17:47):
Well, actually, if you put it that way, yes,
some of them do.
Amy Martin (17:52):
One of my favorite terrestrial animal sounds is
when a group of coyotes liftstheir voices in chorus, filling
up the stillness of the night.And I love knowing that as these
families of furry mammals throwback their heads and sing into
(18:13):
the darkness, somewhere,thousands of miles away in the
ocean, groups of fish might bedoing the same thing, in their
way.
And of course, people havealways responded to the waxing
(18:37):
and waning of the moon too andthe turning of the seasons,
sunrises and sunsets, just likethe fish, these transitional
times are often when we gatherand sing. The rhythms of human
culture are resting on patternsthat stretch way back in time
and way down into the ocean anddown into rivers and lakes too.
(19:05):
Back in Sweden, after a30-minute ski on the lake, Sigge
and I have returned to the placewhere I left the hydrophone. I
pull it up...
That's the sound of a doglicking a hydrophone.
...And tucked the gear away.Phase one of my listening
experiment is over. Now it'stime to go inside, put a log on
(19:25):
the fire and listen back to hearif anyone decided to swim up to
the mic and say hello. We'llfind out after this short break.
Dallas Taylor (19:36):
Hi, I'm Dallas Taylor, host of 20,000 Hertz, a
podcast that reveals the untoldstories behind the sounds of our
world. We've uncovered theincredible intelligence of
talking parrots.
Basically, bird brain was apejorative term, and here I had
(20:00):
this bird that was doing thesame types of tasks as the
primates.
We've investigated the bondingpower of music.
Unknown (20:07):
There's an intimacy there in communicating through
the medium of music that can bereally a powerful force for
bringing people together.
Dallas Taylor (20:16):
We've explored the subtle nuances of the human
voice.
Unknown (20:19):
We have to remember that humans, over many hundreds
of thousands of years ofevolution, have become extremely
attuned to the sounds of eachother's voices.
Dallas Taylor (20:28):
And we'ce revealed why a famous composer
wrote a piece made entirely ofsilence.
Unknown (20:33):
I think that's a really potentially quite useful and
quite profound experience tohave.
Dallas Taylor (20:38):
Subscribe to 20,000 Hertz right here in your
podcast player. I'll meet youthere.
Amy Martin (20:44):
Hey, I want to take a minute to thank you for
listening to Threshold and toexplain how important you are in
getting the show made. Mostpodcasts raise money by selling
advertising, and that pushesthem to make a lot of episodes
as quickly as possible. Butthat's just not who we are. Our
show is about thinking deeplyabout how humans are fitting
(21:07):
into the rest of the web oflife. We take you places and
craft stories that areintellectually challenging and
emotionally rich. That's thekind of show we want to make,
and that's the kind of showyou've told us you want to hear.
That's why we created anindependent, non-profit media
company, and why nearly all ofour funding comes from listeners
(21:29):
like you. This is not theeasiest way of funding a show,
but it is the way that's mostaligned with our mission, and
it's worked so far, thanks topeople who decide to support it.
Our year-end fundraisingcampaign is happening now
through December 31 and eachgift will be matched by our
(21:51):
partners at NewsMatch. Thatmeans, if you can give $25 we'll
receive 50. You can make yourdonation online at
thresholdpodcast.org. Just clickthe donate button and give what
you can and again, thank you somuch for listening.
(22:17):
Welcome back to Threshold, I'mAmy Martin, and I have a little
challenge for you (22:20):
as you move through your next few days, see
if you can identify spaces youlive in close proximity to but
that you can't actually access,like inside the walls of your
house or apartment or maybe alocked closet at your office or
school. For me, one of theseplaces is the dark layer of
(22:44):
water under this frozen lake.It's just beneath my feet, but
I'm cut off from it. Sure, Icould dip in and out, but it's
not like I can actually hang outdown there, but when I pull up
the recording I made on mycomputer and put on my
headphones, it's the closestI've ever been to being there
(23:04):
inside that cold, quiet world.Again, this was early spring, 70
miles below the Arctic Circle.For much of the winter, the sun
barely crosses the horizon here,so I don't expect any fish in
this lake to be feelingparticularly chatty. But then
(23:25):
faintly I hear something. It'svery subtle, but it's definitely
there. Something is talking. Thesound gets louder as the fish
gets closer, I can picture itswimming toward the hydrophone,
wondering what this odd thing inthe water could be, and then it
(23:48):
swims right up to the mic andintroduces itself. And I feel
sort of honored. Someone decidedto talk to me! And now this lake
doesn't just have some fish init. It has this fish. This
animal that survived here underthe ice all winter long. It was
(24:11):
a moment of contact, not justwith this creature, but with a
whole world that in many ways,feels alien to me, even though
it's right there, right underthe surface. I actually think
this might be the most importantuse of this kind of listening,
the way it expands our capacityto connect with our planet
(24:34):
mates. But beyond that, what canI do with this fish sound I've
recorded? If I was a scientiststudying fish or this ecosystem
overall, why would I go to thetrouble to make an underwater
recording?
Dr. Miles Parsons (24:50):
There's a number of reasons. Purely
listening to all of the diversesounds that you've got provide
you with a measure of the healthof that area.
Amy Martin (24:57):
I'm back in Perth, Australia, talking with Dr.
Miles Parsons now. He's aresearcher with the Australian
Institute of Marine Science. Italked to him the morning after
he'd flown back to Australiafrom the UK, where he grew up,
and he was understandably tired.
Dr. Miles Parsons (25:14):
Last time I was tired in an interview, I
told him I was going to do aChristmas album made up of fish
calls.
Amy Martin (25:19):
Can you do a little demo?
Dr. Miles Parsons (25:20):
No.
Amy Martin (25:22):
I think this is a brilliant idea. Do it Miles. But
collecting sounds for what woulddefinitely be a hit album is
just one of many reasons torecord the sounds of fish.
Dr. Miles Parsons (25:34):
You can start to get an idea of what is the
essential fish habitat thatthey're going to, how many of
them are going there, and whatelse is driving them being
there.
Amy Martin (25:45):
Fish sounds can help tell us if an area has been over
fished, or if it's polluted, orif it's on the road to recovery.
Dr. Miles Parsons (25:53):
You go from completely dead, no sounds to
healthy, lots of differentsounds. So if we can tease out
what's going on in that slidingscale in between, then you've
got a nice metric of being ableto monitor biodiversity and
health.
Amy Martin (26:09):
So if I was doing a study of that Swedish lake, my
recording could become onelittle tile in a mosaic of sonic
information that together wouldhelp tell the story of its
history, its future, its currentstate of health. But only if I
can identify which species offish responded to my request for
an interview. Was it a grayling,a perch, an Arctic char? Miles
(26:33):
says scientists need new toolsto help them answer these kinds
of questions.
Dr. Miles Parsons (26:38):
So in an ideal world, you'd have
something that would be theequivalent of Shazam for music.
Amy Martin (26:43):
Shazam is an app that you can use to identify
music. You hold your phone uprecord a few seconds of a song,
and it spits out a title, andit's usually right.
Dr. Miles Parsons (26:52):
The analog for science is you have say,
I-Naturalist, where you take aphoto of a plant, it shows you
what the plant is. Or BirdNet,you can record a bird, or you
can try and do an impression ofa bird, and it will tell you
what probability it is of whatspecies.
Amy Martin (27:08):
Another great bird sound app is called Merlin.
Miles is working on a projectthat might someday allow us to
do the same thing with fish.It's called...
Dr. Miles Parsons (27:18):
The Global Library of Underwater Biological
Sounds. GLUBS. Which isonomatopoeically, I think it's
fantastic.
Amy Martin (27:26):
It's brilliant. It's truly brilliant.
Dr. Miles Parsons (27:28):
I love it. There were two of us that
independently came up with thatacronym. I mean, it does kind of
lend itself anyway. We we werelooking at creating a reference
library, and we're all focusedon underwater biological sounds.
Amy Martin (27:43):
Researchers from close to 30 institutions around
the world are involved in GLUBS.Miles says this kind of platform
is needed to help collect andorganize the massive number of
sounds that are now beingrecorded all over the globe.
Dr. Miles Parsons (27:58):
There's a lot of things that have happened
recently. The sensors that weused to have back in, let's say,
2000 you'd be going outrecording with, say, your hand
held recorder and a DAT tape,and recording for one or two
hours. And now you can find arecorder that will go out, you
can deploy it, and it can recordfor six months or so, even a
(28:20):
year and pick up a wealth ofdata, and it may be a quarter of
the price.
Amy Martin (28:24):
The quality the audio we're able to record has
also grown exponentially, so wecan now record in more places
for longer periods of time inmuch higher fidelity than ever
before. And that means it'spossible to conceive of a day
when we have good recordings ofall the fish on earth.
Dr. Miles Parsons (28:42):
Now that's going to take a while.
Amy Martin (28:44):
Again, scientists have so far documented that
about a thousand fish speciesmake sound out of around just
1200 studied.
Dr. Miles Parsons (28:52):
We expect somewhere between 15 and 25,000
species of fish produce sound ofsome kind. So we got a long way
to go.
Amy Martin (29:03):
But recording all of this sound is one thing, using
it is another. In just 30minutes, I captured quite a few
sounds in that Swedish lake. IfI were a scientist, each of
those sounds would need to beidentified, labeled, organized,
stored. And 30 minutes isnothing really. What if I had 30
(29:24):
hours of recordings or 3000? Itwouldn't take long for me to
record more acoustic data than Icould ever listen to. This is
the situation that a lot ofbioacoustics researchers are in
right now. The rate at whichwe're able to acquire data has
far outpaced the rate at whichwe can process it.
Dr. Miles Parsons (29:44):
We're moving into an era where artificial
intelligence can start toanalyze these huge volumes of
data that we're collecting.
Amy Martin (29:51):
Scientists are already using AI to search
through thousands of hours ofrecordings at lightning speed
and say, here are all the soundsthat seem to be alike.
Dr. Miles Parsons (30:01):
And then we can build up these data sets
that AI algorithms can thensearch for in other recordings,
but that will take time.
Amy Martin (30:11):
Later this season, we'll learn about efforts to use
AI to actually decode what otheranimals are saying, kind of like
the universal translator in StarTrek, but for dogs or dolphins.
But we can't translate a voicewe've never heard or never paid
attention to. Someone stillneeds to do the foundational
(30:31):
work of pairing the singers withthe song. That's why researchers
like Lauren Hawkins are manuallylistening through hour upon hour
of recordings, making notes,talking to other researchers,
helping to assemble an accuratereference catalog of sounds.
Lauren Hawkins (30:49):
Like I'm at the real basic stages of just being
like, that's a fish chorus thatthat was found there, these are
the parameters of what it lookslike, and this is what it does.
Okay, that's one. And then thenext and then the next one and
the next one and the next one.But that's a really good
foundation for someone to thengo in and go, well, how does
this fish course change overtime?
Amy Martin (31:12):
Then we can ask questions about things like
population size and health,changes in ocean currents, the
status of associated predatorsand prey, including the highest
impact predator in the sea, us.Overfishing is the biggest
global threat these animalsface. Simply put, we're pulling
(31:34):
fish out of the water muchfaster than they can reproduce.
It's an unsustainable level ofconsumption with a host of
complex factors at play, fromillegal fishing to harmful
fishing practices, wastefulbycatch and more, and that's
before we even get into climate,pollution and other impacts.
(31:54):
Lauren says all of this bringsreal urgency to her work.
Lauren Hawkins (31:58):
So by the time we get our hydrophones out, you
know, what used to be theremight not be there anymore. So
it's really important that thatwe we start getting those
baselines, but then we also usethat to inform how we need to
monitor into the future.
Amy Martin (32:13):
It's not all about tracking problems. She says it's
also about measuring success. Ifwe try out a new management
strategy in the effort to bringa species back from decline, and
it works, then we need to knowthat.
Lauren Hawkins (32:27):
We've got to have some way to measure it. You
don't know you've won unlessyou've got a score. And using
acoustics and using fish is away of scoring it.
Amy Martin (32:37):
So fish sounds can be put to use in very concrete,
specific projects, but they canalso be part of the larger quest
of our era, bringing ourselvesinto better relationship with
our planet mates. As mammals, wetend to bond most deeply with
other mammals, even species thatlook really different from us,
(33:01):
like whales or elephants, formrelationships that we recognize
and can relate to.
Lauren Hawkins (33:07):
So, you already have that sort of emotional
connection, and you canempathize with the plight of
these animals.
Amy Martin (33:14):
Fish are different, and often we tend to turn away
from difference, to recoil fromit or fill the gap with
assumptions and fictions. Wetell ourselves that fish are
stupid or that they don't feelpain. But Lauren says it's not
so easy to disregard fish whenyou listen to them.
Lauren Hawkins (33:38):
These animals are, they are communicating.
They are animals. They have alife. You know, if they're
animals that can talk to eachother during their daily lives,
they're communicating. There isintelligence there.
Amy Martin (33:56):
Maybe fish pose a special challenge to our
intelligence. Are we smartenough to drop our
preconceptions and comprehendthe sounds they make on their
own terms? Lauren's hopeful thatbioacoustics can be more than a
scientific tool, that it canopen people up to the wonder of
(34:17):
the conversations happeningaround us all the time. Not only
among fish, but all kinds ofcreatures.
Lauren Hawkins (34:24):
Oh, I love it. I love I love the research that I
do. I could easily do it for therest of my life. I never lose
that sense of like, how lucky Iam to be able to listening in
and to hear things that peopledon't hear and people don't
know. Like, there's recordinglocations close to shore, which
(34:44):
people use very regularly, andI'm like, you would have no idea
that underneath the surfacethere's a blue whale going past,
and there's, you know, finwhales, and there's humpback
whales, you know, screamingaround.
Amy Martin (35:00):
And these fish choruses.
Lauren Hawkins (35:02):
And these fish chrouses. Yeah, these guys are
calling, and all this life ishappening that, yeah, if you
didn't pop your, your head downin the water, you wouldn't, you
wouldn't know.
Dr. Miles Parsons (35:20):
There are an amazing variety of different
sounds that are absolutelyfantastic. I've played piano
from like four years old, sohave a strong connection to
music. And as far as I'mconcerned, the fish noises and
the marine noises and soundscapeis all a form of music.
Amy Martin (35:44):
There are few things more comforting than
understanding another person andfeeling understood. We can pick
familiar voices out of a crowd.We're hardwired to pay attention
to communication from those weknow and love, but talking to
Lauren and Miles and feelingtheir excitement about tuning
(36:04):
into creatures who communicateso differently from us, makes me
wonder if we're also hardwiredfor listening across huge
divides. Yes, we humans can beclose minded and arrogant and
fearful of the unknown, but wecan also find connection and
sheer delight in the mystery ofthe unks and boops and kwas.
(36:39):
This episode of Threshold waswritten, recorded and produced
by me, Amy Martin, with helpfrom Erika Janik and Sam Moore.
Music by Todd Sickafoose.Post-production by Alan Douches.
Fact checking by Sam Moore.Special thanks to Lauren
Hawkins, Miles Parsons and TimLamont for many of the fish
(37:00):
recordings you heard in thisepisode. Clara Amorim and Raquel
Vasconcelos recorded thatLusitanian toadfish. Herbert
Tiepelt recorded the pikeperchpercussionist and Marta Bolgan
provided the "unknown kwa" Ilove so much. Additional
recordings came from more than adozen other scientists, many of
(37:21):
whom have contributed sounds tothe website fishsounds.net.
Check the show notes or ourwebsite for links to many of
these sounds and the scientistswho recorded them. This show is
made by Auricle Productions, anonprofit organization powered
by listener donations. DeneenWeiske is our Executive
Director. You can find out moreabout our show at threshold
(37:43):
podcast.org.
The time is a few 100 million years ago. The place
is the ocean, any ocean, and youare a fish, one of the planet's
first vertebrates. You haveemerged into a very quiet world.
There's the snap and crackleshrimp and other invertebrates,
(00:22):
but usually the loudest sound inthe sea is the water itself,
washing up against your fins andscales. But then one day, you
feel it, an urge to be heard, todeclare your presence. You
squeeze the muscles around thelittle balloon inside your body,
(00:44):
your swim bladder, and a callrings out into the darkness, and
to your surprise, somebody callsback.
(01:05):
Fish were among the first marineanimals to use sound for
communication. Of course, thisability evolved gradually, not
all at once, like I was playingwith here, but still, after more
than 4 billion years of veryquiet oceans, fish began to fill
the sea with their voices. Itwas the dawn of a new era, the
(01:29):
birth of dialog, conversationsmade of clicks and thumps,
croaks and whoops and whateveryou'd call this.
Lauren Hawkins (01:41):
Ah, this is my favorite one.
Amy Martin (01:44):
Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and
this is marine biologist LaurenHawkins.
Lauren Hawkins (01:49):
So just like many other animals in the ocean
that we know of, like whales anddolphins, fish also produce
sound to communicate.
Amy Martin (01:58):
This season, we're listening to our fellow
earthlings, roughly in the orderin which they evolved. And fish
are way, way back in thattimeline, after microbes, corals
and some other invertebrates,but long before almost
everything else. And the earliera creature emerged in that
story, the wider the gap betweenthem and us, at least in our own
(02:23):
minds. But Lauren says listeningto fish communicate, even just
knowing that they can and docommunicate, starts to open up a
portal between our two worlds.
Lauren Hawkins (02:35):
Yeah, listening to fish has definitely given me
a very different view into howto value life other than human
life.
Amy Martin (02:45):
Fish are an essential food source for
everything from otters to ospreyto the dolphins we met in our
last episode, and for us humanstoo. A world without fish would
be a world in which food webscollapse and billions of people
go hungry, so it is very much inour own interest to pay
(03:06):
attention to what they have tosay. But also, fish are our
neighbors. They don't look likeus or act much like us, but that
doesn't mean they're not worthgetting to know. In fact, those
differences are a big part ofwhat makes fish conversation so
fascinating and useful. Theseanimals have stories to tell
(03:29):
about some of the parts of ourplanet that are the most
mysterious to us. In thisepisode, we're going to meet
people who are figuring out howto listen to these fish tales
and learn from them.
(04:09):
It's early spring, and I'mstanding on a frozen lake in
northern Sweden. The ice is atleast two feet thick, maybe
three, but I know there's alittle hole drilled through it
here somewhere, hiding under athin layer of crusty snow. I'm
using my cross country ski poolto find it.
Ah, there it went.
This is an ice fishing hole justbig enough to drop a line down
(04:32):
into. But I have a differentpurpose in mind.
I'm going to hook up ahydrophone, which is basically
just a microphone at the end ofa long waterproof cord, and the
microphone itself is waterproof,and I'm gonna plunk it down
there into this very cold lakeand see if we can hear any fish
or any other signs of life.
(04:55):
So what you're listening to hereis the beginning of a passive
acoustic monitoring session.That sounds kind of fancy, but
it's not. The basic idea is youtake a microphone, connect it to
a recorder, and leave it runningwhile you exit the scene.
Sigge's very curious about this.Don't eat my mittens.
My technical assistant for theday is a handsome fellow named
(05:20):
Sigge with big brown eyes, adistinctive profile and a strong
desire to chew on my gear. As Ilower the hydrophone down into
the lake, he decides to do someenergetic digging up on the
surface, and I can hear everyscratch of his paws through the
hydrophone. It's shocking howwell the sound translates down
(05:42):
into the water through thisthick layer of ice. It makes me
realize that every noise we makeup here on the surface impacts
the acoustic environment in thewater below.
You're being very helpful withthis recording Sigge.
I cover up the recorder in caseit starts to snow, clip into my
(06:04):
cross country skis and head outacross the lake. I want to get
myself and my dog as far awayfrom the microphone as I can so
none of our noise interfereswith whatever might feel like
coming in to visit. We'll checkback later to see if anyone
decided to talk.
(06:26):
Fish live almost everywhere wefind water, and that's 70% of
the surface of the earth. We areutterly dependent on these
aquatic parts of our planet, butmany of them are really hard to
access, like the dark, frigidlayer of water under a frozen
lake or the depths of the ocean.Lauren Hawkins says fish can
(06:48):
serve as emissaries from thoseplaces.
Lauren Hawkins (06:51):
We have to find ways to monitor the health of
our marine environments, andfish are very good indicators
for that.
Amy Martin (06:58):
I visited Lauren at Curtin University in Perth,
Australia, while she was workingon her PhD in fish acoustics.
Lauren Hawkins (07:05):
Acoustically, we know very little. We hear all
these sounds, and we're like,oh, yeah, that sort of is most
likely a fish because it's gotthese characteristics. But we
don't 100% know, and we alsodon't know what fish they are.
Amy Martin (07:23):
People have known that fish make sounds for a very
long time. You can see it in thenames we've given some of them:
croakers, grunts, trumpeters.But even so, Lauren says people
are often confused when shetells them she studies fish
acoustics. We don't really thinkabout fish making sounds. In
(07:44):
fact, many people, myselfincluded, don't think about fish
that much at all. Lauren says wedon't even know precisely how
many fish species exist onEarth.
Lauren Hawkins (07:56):
Yeah, and you know so much of the ocean is
still unexplored. We're stillfinding new species of fish.
Amy Martin (08:02):
That surprised me. I mean, I'm as interested in
finding extraterrestrial life asthe next person, but we don't
even know all the life forms wehave on this planet. So one of
the many uses of passiveacoustic monitoring is just
answering the basic question ofwhat animals live on Earth, and
once we know who's talking, wecan start to ask about what
(08:26):
they're saying and how they'resaying it, and why. Lauren says
there are two main ways thatfish produce sound.
Lauren Hawkins (08:33):
So the first is through sort of strumming or
stridulation of bony body parts.So that's like, you know, they
flick their fin rays againsttheir pectoral girdle and things
like that.
Amy Martin (08:46):
That's a freshwater fish known as a zander, or a
pike perch, doing this kind ofpercussive sound-making.
Lauren Hawkins (08:54):
But the second is using their swim bladder, and
they use it as sort of like aresonator. So there's like sonic
muscles that contract the swimbladder, and it produces a range
of different noises.
Amy Martin (09:11):
That is a Lusitanian toadfish making a sound that
scientists call a boat whistle,which is not the first thing
that came to mind when I heardit.
Swim bladders are internal sacksthat help fish swim, or at least
(09:35):
float. They're filled with air,and most living fish species
have them by letting air in andout of the bladders. Fish can
move up and down in the water.People have swim bladders too,
sort of. We call them lungs, andwhen we're in the water, we can
also use them to help controlour buoyancy. We are actually
(09:58):
descendants of a branch of veryearly fish that never developed
swim bladders. Instead, theyheld onto their proto lungs, and
some of them evolved into thecreatures that eventually
crawled up out of the sea andbecame the first vertebrates on
land. But that part of the storycomes way later. For millions of
(10:19):
years, fish were the mostcomplex life forms on the
planet, and likely the noisiest.When scientists record these
sounds, they give them fun nameslike sneaks, unks, snorts and
boops. This is one of myfavorites, an unknown fish
creating its own little dancerhythm using a sound that
(10:42):
someone called a kwa.
The total number of fish speciesidentified so far is around
35,000. Only about 1200 of thosehave been studied to see if they
produce sounds, but of those,more than 80% do. And that means
(11:07):
there are tons of species offish out there whose voices we
either haven't heard yet or wecan't yet identify.
Lauren Hawkins (11:14):
And even this morning, for example, I'm
looking at a new data set, and Iwas like, what is that sound?
I've never seen that soundbefore, and I was like, calling
everyone in I'm like, whalepeople. Is this a whale sound?
Like, is this a fish? Is this awhale? We don't know. So it's a
privilege to be able toeavesdrop and actually be like,
(11:35):
wow, what's, what's, what'shappening here?
Amy Martin (11:39):
If an alien civilization wanted to study
human communication, they couldscoop us up into their
spaceships and see how we reactto different stimuli. Or they
could drop microphones down intoour various habitats without
being detected, presumably, andjust listen to us being human on
(11:59):
our farms, in our villages, inbig, bustling cities. Scientists
interested in fish sounds face asimilar choice. They can pull
animals out of the water and dothings to them, often unpleasant
things to trigger responses. ButLauren says she was drawn to
passive acoustic monitoringbecause it opened up a different
(12:22):
way of getting to know thesecreatures.
Lauren Hawkins (12:25):
I wanted to be able to look at the natural
world in a way where I didn'thave to interfere with the
animals. I didn't have to get inthe water with them. I didn't
have to take things out of thewater and mess with them and
things like that.
Amy Martin (12:41):
Taking this more receptive role means we get to
hear the sounds fish make whenthey're out there in the world
being fish, which is verydifferent from anything that can
be produced in a lab.
Lauren Hawkins (12:53):
Acoustics is a really amazing way of, sort of
seeing into their private livesthat you usually wouldn't know
anything about, and give youclues as to you know how they're
going about their daily livesand what things are associated
with that.
Amy Martin (13:10):
Lauren says all kinds of surprising things crop
up.
Lauren Hawkins (13:13):
This is the sound that I found this morning.
And was like, what is this?
Amy Martin (13:18):
She pulls up the mystery sound on her computer so
we can listen to it.
Where was this recorded?
Lauren Hawkins (13:23):
This is recorded in South Australia.
Amy Martin (13:26):
And you just got this data.
Lauren Hawkins (13:28):
I just, well, I've had it for a while, but
I've just processed it, but thisis the first time I've looked at
it.
Amy Martin (13:33):
Lauren gives me her headphones and hits play. At
first, I don't hear anything,but underwater hiss.
Lauren Hawkins (13:41):
So it's very low frequency.
Amy Martin (13:44):
But then out of that noise, a signal emerges.
Oh, do it again? That's so cool.
Lauren Hawkins (13:58):
Yeah, I know right, but I have no idea what
it is.
Amy Martin (14:00):
It's a monster!
Lauren Hawkins (14:01):
It is.
Amy Martin (14:01):
You just discovered a sea monster.
Lauren Hawkins (14:05):
So you think about a lot of whales, they kind
of sound like that, but it'sjust not whaley enough.
Amy Martin (14:13):
As it turns out, it was whaley enough. She learned
later it's some sort of baleenwhale. So far, the species is
undetermined. So step one hereis identification. Who's talking
or moaning. But then thequestion becomes, what are they
trying to say? Lauren says fishuse sounds to communicate in all
(14:36):
kinds of contexts, breeding,feeding, raising the alarm.
Lauren Hawkins (14:41):
Aggregation, calling each other to come
together, essentially, yeah.
Amy Martin (14:46):
Party over here?
Lauren Hawkins (14:47):
Yeah, pretty much, yeah, or let's stay in a
group so we don't all get eaten.Who's in the middle? Dave, are
you in the middle?
Amy Martin (14:59):
These collective communications are what really
captivates Lauren. They'recalled fish choruses.
Lauren Hawkins (15:07):
Fish choruses happen when lots and lots and
lots of fish all call at thesame time, and they produce
sound continuously, and in doingso, they can dominate
soundscapes. So it's a bigacoustic event.
Amy Martin (15:27):
Fish choruses are the rock concerts of the marine
world. They can actually belouder than rock concerts or
airplanes taking off. People inMalaysia, Thailand and some
other countries, have traditionsof listening out for fish
choruses to help them figure outwhere to drop their lines and
nets. This is a chorus of eelswhich I would definitely rather
(15:50):
not encounter while I'm out fora swim.
These choruses happen all overthe world among a wide variety
of species. Some fish chorus afew times a year, in sync with
the seasons. Other kinds of fishmake choruses as part of their
daily commute between differentlayers of ocean water.
Lauren Hawkins (16:13):
What happens every evening is fish move up
from the depths up to thesurface to feed at night time.
There'll sort of be this lead upto the chorus. They start
getting a little bit closertogether, more animals start
chiming in, sort of like beinglike, oh, you're calling, I'm
(16:34):
gonna start. And it just buildsand builds and builds until
there's so many fish callingthat it just can sound like a
just white noise.
So they feed, feed, feed, feed,over through the night, and then
they drop back down around dusk,and then happens again the next
(16:58):
night. It's actually the world'slargest migration. It's huge.
Amy Martin (17:04):
The sounds of these mass migrations can tell us
things about how the fishthemselves are doing, obviously.
But not only that. A fish chorusis almost like a secret language
that can tell us other thingsgoing on in the ocean too.
Lauren Hawkins (17:18):
Things like temperature, moon phase, tidal
range, salinity. So again, therhythms of these are
intrinsically linked to how theocean is working, essentially.
So we can actually use these asindicators for what's happening
environmentally over largeareas, which is really, really
useful.
Amy Martin (17:38):
You just said moon phase. I'm like, wait a minute.
Do fish howl the mood? That isthe coolest thing ever.
Lauren Hawkins (17:47):
Well, actually, if you put it that way, yes,
some of them do.
Amy Martin (17:52):
One of my favorite terrestrial animal sounds is
when a group of coyotes liftstheir voices in chorus, filling
up the stillness of the night.And I love knowing that as these
families of furry mammals throwback their heads and sing into
(18:13):
the darkness, somewhere,thousands of miles away in the
ocean, groups of fish might bedoing the same thing, in their
way.
And of course, people havealways responded to the waxing
(18:37):
and waning of the moon too andthe turning of the seasons,
sunrises and sunsets, just likethe fish, these transitional
times are often when we gatherand sing. The rhythms of human
culture are resting on patternsthat stretch way back in time
and way down into the ocean anddown into rivers and lakes too.
(19:05):
Back in Sweden, after a30-minute ski on the lake, Sigge
and I have returned to the placewhere I left the hydrophone. I
pull it up...
That's the sound of a doglicking a hydrophone.
...And tucked the gear away.Phase one of my listening
experiment is over. Now it'stime to go inside, put a log on
(19:25):
the fire and listen back to hearif anyone decided to swim up to
the mic and say hello. We'llfind out after this short break.
Dallas Taylor (19:36):
Hi, I'm Dallas Taylor, host of 20,000 Hertz, a
podcast that reveals the untoldstories behind the sounds of our
world. We've uncovered theincredible intelligence of
talking parrots.
Basically, bird brain was apejorative term, and here I had
(20:00):
this bird that was doing thesame types of tasks as the
primates.
We've investigated the bondingpower of music.
Unknown (20:07):
There's an intimacy there in communicating through
the medium of music that can bereally a powerful force for
bringing people together.
Dallas Taylor (20:16):
We've explored the subtle nuances of the human
voice.
Unknown (20:19):
We have to remember that humans, over many hundreds
of thousands of years ofevolution, have become extremely
attuned to the sounds of eachother's voices.
Dallas Taylor (20:28):
And we'ce revealed why a famous composer
wrote a piece made entirely ofsilence.
Unknown (20:33):
I think that's a really potentially quite useful and
quite profound experience tohave.
Dallas Taylor (20:38):
Subscribe to 20,000 Hertz right here in your
podcast player. I'll meet youthere.
Amy Martin (20:44):
Hey, I want to take a minute to thank you for
listening to Threshold and toexplain how important you are in
getting the show made. Mostpodcasts raise money by selling
advertising, and that pushesthem to make a lot of episodes
as quickly as possible. Butthat's just not who we are. Our
show is about thinking deeplyabout how humans are fitting
(21:07):
into the rest of the web oflife. We take you places and
craft stories that areintellectually challenging and
emotionally rich. That's thekind of show we want to make,
and that's the kind of showyou've told us you want to hear.
That's why we created anindependent, non-profit media
company, and why nearly all ofour funding comes from listeners
(21:29):
like you. This is not theeasiest way of funding a show,
but it is the way that's mostaligned with our mission, and
it's worked so far, thanks topeople who decide to support it.
Our year-end fundraisingcampaign is happening now
through December 31 and eachgift will be matched by our
(21:51):
partners at NewsMatch. Thatmeans, if you can give $25 we'll
receive 50. You can make yourdonation online at
thresholdpodcast.org. Just clickthe donate button and give what
you can and again, thank you somuch for listening.
(22:17):
Welcome back to Threshold, I'mAmy Martin, and I have a little
challenge for you (22:20):
as you move through your next few days, see
if you can identify spaces youlive in close proximity to but
that you can't actually access,like inside the walls of your
house or apartment or maybe alocked closet at your office or
school. For me, one of theseplaces is the dark layer of
(22:44):
water under this frozen lake.It's just beneath my feet, but
I'm cut off from it. Sure, Icould dip in and out, but it's
not like I can actually hang outdown there, but when I pull up
the recording I made on mycomputer and put on my
headphones, it's the closestI've ever been to being there
(23:04):
inside that cold, quiet world.Again, this was early spring, 70
miles below the Arctic Circle.For much of the winter, the sun
barely crosses the horizon here,so I don't expect any fish in
this lake to be feelingparticularly chatty. But then
(23:25):
faintly I hear something. It'svery subtle, but it's definitely
there. Something is talking. Thesound gets louder as the fish
gets closer, I can picture itswimming toward the hydrophone,
wondering what this odd thing inthe water could be, and then it
(23:48):
swims right up to the mic andintroduces itself. And I feel
sort of honored. Someone decidedto talk to me! And now this lake
doesn't just have some fish init. It has this fish. This
animal that survived here underthe ice all winter long. It was
(24:11):
a moment of contact, not justwith this creature, but with a
whole world that in many ways,feels alien to me, even though
it's right there, right underthe surface. I actually think
this might be the most importantuse of this kind of listening,
the way it expands our capacityto connect with our planet
(24:34):
mates. But beyond that, what canI do with this fish sound I've
recorded? If I was a scientiststudying fish or this ecosystem
overall, why would I go to thetrouble to make an underwater
recording?
Dr. Miles Parsons (24:50):
There's a number of reasons. Purely
listening to all of the diversesounds that you've got provide
you with a measure of the healthof that area.
Amy Martin (24:57):
I'm back in Perth, Australia, talking with Dr.
Miles Parsons now. He's aresearcher with the Australian
Institute of Marine Science. Italked to him the morning after
he'd flown back to Australiafrom the UK, where he grew up,
and he was understandably tired.
Dr. Miles Parsons (25:14):
Last time I was tired in an interview, I
told him I was going to do aChristmas album made up of fish
calls.
Amy Martin (25:19):
Can you do a little demo?
Dr. Miles Parsons (25:20):
No.
Amy Martin (25:22):
I think this is a brilliant idea. Do it Miles. But
collecting sounds for what woulddefinitely be a hit album is
just one of many reasons torecord the sounds of fish.
Dr. Miles Parsons (25:34):
You can start to get an idea of what is the
essential fish habitat thatthey're going to, how many of
them are going there, and whatelse is driving them being
there.
Amy Martin (25:45):
Fish sounds can help tell us if an area has been over
fished, or if it's polluted, orif it's on the road to recovery.
Dr. Miles Parsons (25:53):
You go from completely dead, no sounds to
healthy, lots of differentsounds. So if we can tease out
what's going on in that slidingscale in between, then you've
got a nice metric of being ableto monitor biodiversity and
health.
Amy Martin (26:09):
So if I was doing a study of that Swedish lake, my
recording could become onelittle tile in a mosaic of sonic
information that together wouldhelp tell the story of its
history, its future, its currentstate of health. But only if I
can identify which species offish responded to my request for
an interview. Was it a grayling,a perch, an Arctic char? Miles
(26:33):
says scientists need new toolsto help them answer these kinds
of questions.
Dr. Miles Parsons (26:38):
So in an ideal world, you'd have
something that would be theequivalent of Shazam for music.
Amy Martin (26:43):
Shazam is an app that you can use to identify
music. You hold your phone uprecord a few seconds of a song,
and it spits out a title, andit's usually right.
Dr. Miles Parsons (26:52):
The analog for science is you have say,
I-Naturalist, where you take aphoto of a plant, it shows you
what the plant is. Or BirdNet,you can record a bird, or you
can try and do an impression ofa bird, and it will tell you
what probability it is of whatspecies.
Amy Martin (27:08):
Another great bird sound app is called Merlin.
Miles is working on a projectthat might someday allow us to
do the same thing with fish.It's called...
Dr. Miles Parsons (27:18):
The Global Library of Underwater Biological
Sounds. GLUBS. Which isonomatopoeically, I think it's
fantastic.
Amy Martin (27:26):
It's brilliant. It's truly brilliant.
Dr. Miles Parsons (27:28):
I love it. There were two of us that
independently came up with thatacronym. I mean, it does kind of
lend itself anyway. We we werelooking at creating a reference
library, and we're all focusedon underwater biological sounds.
Amy Martin (27:43):
Researchers from close to 30 institutions around
the world are involved in GLUBS.Miles says this kind of platform
is needed to help collect andorganize the massive number of
sounds that are now beingrecorded all over the globe.
Dr. Miles Parsons (27:58):
There's a lot of things that have happened
recently. The sensors that weused to have back in, let's say,
2000 you'd be going outrecording with, say, your hand
held recorder and a DAT tape,and recording for one or two
hours. And now you can find arecorder that will go out, you
can deploy it, and it can recordfor six months or so, even a
(28:20):
year and pick up a wealth ofdata, and it may be a quarter of
the price.
Amy Martin (28:24):
The quality the audio we're able to record has
also grown exponentially, so wecan now record in more places
for longer periods of time inmuch higher fidelity than ever
before. And that means it'spossible to conceive of a day
when we have good recordings ofall the fish on earth.
Dr. Miles Parsons (28:42):
Now that's going to take a while.
Amy Martin (28:44):
Again, scientists have so far documented that
about a thousand fish speciesmake sound out of around just
1200 studied.
Dr. Miles Parsons (28:52):
We expect somewhere between 15 and 25,000
species of fish produce sound ofsome kind. So we got a long way
to go.
Amy Martin (29:03):
But recording all of this sound is one thing, using
it is another. In just 30minutes, I captured quite a few
sounds in that Swedish lake. IfI were a scientist, each of
those sounds would need to beidentified, labeled, organized,
stored. And 30 minutes isnothing really. What if I had 30
(29:24):
hours of recordings or 3000? Itwouldn't take long for me to
record more acoustic data than Icould ever listen to. This is
the situation that a lot ofbioacoustics researchers are in
right now. The rate at whichwe're able to acquire data has
far outpaced the rate at whichwe can process it.
Dr. Miles Parsons (29:44):
We're moving into an era where artificial
intelligence can start toanalyze these huge volumes of
data that we're collecting.
Amy Martin (29:51):
Scientists are already using AI to search
through thousands of hours ofrecordings at lightning speed
and say, here are all the soundsthat seem to be alike.
Dr. Miles Parsons (30:01):
And then we can build up these data sets
that AI algorithms can thensearch for in other recordings,
but that will take time.
Amy Martin (30:11):
Later this season, we'll learn about efforts to use
AI to actually decode what otheranimals are saying, kind of like
the universal translator in StarTrek, but for dogs or dolphins.
But we can't translate a voicewe've never heard or never paid
attention to. Someone stillneeds to do the foundational
(30:31):
work of pairing the singers withthe song. That's why researchers
like Lauren Hawkins are manuallylistening through hour upon hour
of recordings, making notes,talking to other researchers,
helping to assemble an accuratereference catalog of sounds.
Lauren Hawkins (30:49):
Like I'm at the real basic stages of just being
like, that's a fish chorus thatthat was found there, these are
the parameters of what it lookslike, and this is what it does.
Okay, that's one. And then thenext and then the next one and
the next one and the next one.But that's a really good
foundation for someone to thengo in and go, well, how does
this fish course change overtime?
Amy Martin (31:12):
Then we can ask questions about things like
population size and health,changes in ocean currents, the
status of associated predatorsand prey, including the highest
impact predator in the sea, us.Overfishing is the biggest
global threat these animalsface. Simply put, we're pulling
(31:34):
fish out of the water muchfaster than they can reproduce.
It's an unsustainable level ofconsumption with a host of
complex factors at play, fromillegal fishing to harmful
fishing practices, wastefulbycatch and more, and that's
before we even get into climate,pollution and other impacts.
(31:54):
Lauren says all of this bringsreal urgency to her work.
Lauren Hawkins (31:58):
So by the time we get our hydrophones out, you
know, what used to be theremight not be there anymore. So
it's really important that thatwe we start getting those
baselines, but then we also usethat to inform how we need to
monitor into the future.
Amy Martin (32:13):
It's not all about tracking problems. She says it's
also about measuring success. Ifwe try out a new management
strategy in the effort to bringa species back from decline, and
it works, then we need to knowthat.
Lauren Hawkins (32:27):
We've got to have some way to measure it. You
don't know you've won unlessyou've got a score. And using
acoustics and using fish is away of scoring it.
Amy Martin (32:37):
So fish sounds can be put to use in very concrete,
specific projects, but they canalso be part of the larger quest
of our era, bringing ourselvesinto better relationship with
our planet mates. As mammals, wetend to bond most deeply with
other mammals, even species thatlook really different from us,
(33:01):
like whales or elephants, formrelationships that we recognize
and can relate to.
Lauren Hawkins (33:07):
So, you already have that sort of emotional
connection, and you canempathize with the plight of
these animals.
Amy Martin (33:14):
Fish are different, and often we tend to turn away
from difference, to recoil fromit or fill the gap with
assumptions and fictions. Wetell ourselves that fish are
stupid or that they don't feelpain. But Lauren says it's not
so easy to disregard fish whenyou listen to them.
Lauren Hawkins (33:38):
These animals are, they are communicating.
They are animals. They have alife. You know, if they're
animals that can talk to eachother during their daily lives,
they're communicating. There isintelligence there.
Amy Martin (33:56):
Maybe fish pose a special challenge to our
intelligence. Are we smartenough to drop our
preconceptions and comprehendthe sounds they make on their
own terms? Lauren's hopeful thatbioacoustics can be more than a
scientific tool, that it canopen people up to the wonder of
(34:17):
the conversations happeningaround us all the time. Not only
among fish, but all kinds ofcreatures.
Lauren Hawkins (34:24):
Oh, I love it. I love I love the research that I
do. I could easily do it for therest of my life. I never lose
that sense of like, how lucky Iam to be able to listening in
and to hear things that peopledon't hear and people don't
know. Like, there's recordinglocations close to shore, which
(34:44):
people use very regularly, andI'm like, you would have no idea
that underneath the surfacethere's a blue whale going past,
and there's, you know, finwhales, and there's humpback
whales, you know, screamingaround.
Amy Martin (35:00):
And these fish choruses.
Lauren Hawkins (35:02):
And these fish chrouses. Yeah, these guys are
calling, and all this life ishappening that, yeah, if you
didn't pop your, your head downin the water, you wouldn't, you
wouldn't know.
Dr. Miles Parsons (35:20):
There are an amazing variety of different
sounds that are absolutelyfantastic. I've played piano
from like four years old, sohave a strong connection to
music. And as far as I'mconcerned, the fish noises and
the marine noises and soundscapeis all a form of music.
Amy Martin (35:44):
There are few things more comforting than
understanding another person andfeeling understood. We can pick
familiar voices out of a crowd.We're hardwired to pay attention
to communication from those weknow and love, but talking to
Lauren and Miles and feelingtheir excitement about tuning
(36:04):
into creatures who communicateso differently from us, makes me
wonder if we're also hardwiredfor listening across huge
divides. Yes, we humans can beclose minded and arrogant and
fearful of the unknown, but wecan also find connection and
sheer delight in the mystery ofthe unks and boops and kwas.
(36:39):
This episode of Threshold waswritten, recorded and produced
by me, Amy Martin, with helpfrom Erika Janik and Sam Moore.
Music by Todd Sickafoose.Post-production by Alan Douches.
Fact checking by Sam Moore.Special thanks to Lauren
Hawkins, Miles Parsons and TimLamont for many of the fish
(37:00):
recordings you heard in thisepisode. Clara Amorim and Raquel
Vasconcelos recorded thatLusitanian toadfish. Herbert
Tiepelt recorded the pikeperchpercussionist and Marta Bolgan
provided the "unknown kwa" Ilove so much. Additional
recordings came from more than adozen other scientists, many of
(37:21):
whom have contributed sounds tothe website fishsounds.net.
Check the show notes or ourwebsite for links to many of
these sounds and the scientistswho recorded them. This show is
made by Auricle Productions, anonprofit organization powered
by listener donations. DeneenWeiske is our Executive
Director. You can find out moreabout our show at threshold
(37:43):
podcast.org.
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