The Secret to a Sound Ocean

Oceans Initiative is a team of scientists on a mission to protect whales, dolphins and their habitat. To celebrate World Oceans Day, we’re releasing the main findings from our Ocean Noise project. Our clever friends at Column Five Media have helped us turn our cutting-edge acoustics research with Cornell University’s Bioacoustics Research Program into a simple, visual story.  Please feel free to download the infographic, or share our page with your friends.

We’ve been studying marine mammals since 1995, and much of the work we do involves estimating how many marine mammals are found in British Columbia waters, where they live, how human activities impact their lives, and how much food they need to thrive.

But whale habitat is more than physical space and food to eat.

 “The places in which these animals live are defined not only in terms of space, but in terms of sound – they live in an acoustic world and depend on that world for survival,” says Dr. Christopher Clark from the Cornell Lab’s Bioacoustics Research Program, who has been listening in on the whales to get a better understanding of how noise impacts their acoustic habitat. “Imagine living in a village where you can’t see each other or where you’re going. Instead, everyone relies on sounds and calls to go about your lives and to maintain the social network. What happens to your world as the smog of noise gets to the point where you cannot hear each other?”

Once we retrieve the hydrophones, Dimitri Ponirakis works his magic in the Cornell lab, and turns thousands of hours of recordings, terabytes of data, into some results that we can use to quantify how noisy or quiet whale habitats are. We then asked the visionary team at Column 5 Media to help turn our decibels and decimals into a delightfully appealing infographic that communicates our results.

The Secret to a Sound Ocean infographic shows typical noise levels in three frequency bands.  Think of it this way:  the three bands represent what the noise levels may sound like to a killer whale (a soprano), a humpback whale (a tenor) and a fin whale (a bass).  What we’re finding is that some of the most important areas for killer whales (e.g., Robson Bight & Haro Strait) happen to be among the noisiest sites we sampled.  And some of the areas that are most important for humpback whales are fairly quiet (Caamano Sound, Kitkiata Inlet), but could get a lot noisier given the number of industrial developments planned for the area.  Our data for this important area are unique, and we are glad that our funders helped us collect essential baseline recordings while the area is still relatively quiet.

Our plans for this work is to put this all into a framework that allows us to answer the So What? question.  We’re able to model how much acoustic habitat these different whale species lose in sites with different noise levels.  Rob’s Fulbright Chair position explored the ocean noise issue from a policy perspective.  Now his Marie Curie fellowship at the University of St Andrews allows him to build mathematical models to explore how chronic ocean noise could affect the dynamics of fin, humpback and killer whale populations.

The thing we love most about this issue is that it is a relatively solvable problem that lends itself to creative solutions to make life quieter for marine wildlife.  Our current work identifies whether we can reduce noise levels by asking ships to slow down or avoid certain areas altogether.  We’re identifying whether some areas are so quiet that they should be recognized as national treasures:  acoustic refuges that we try to manage so they stay quiet.  Our mission is to identify noisy areas and to help make them quieter; and to identify quiet areas and to try to keep them quiet.

If you’d like to help our efforts do that, please spread the word.  Please share this page, subscribe to our newsletter, or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or our Aeroplan Beyond Miles donation page.  Thanks again to everyone who has helped us do this work, and Happy World Oceans Day!!!!!

If you have any questions, please contact us:

-Rob Williams & Erin Ashe

One of the overarching themes of our work is quintessentially Canadian.  We study survival.  {Margaret Atwood proposed that survival is one of the most central and enduring narratives in Canadian literature.} OK, we study the probability that whales and dolphins, not humans, will survive from one year to the next, given the amount of fish or noise or propellers in the sea, but bear with us for a minute.

We ran across a few quotes today about the environment from Margaret Atwood’s talk at this week’s “Big Thinking” lecture series in Ontario, and thought you’d want to read them:

With the growing awareness of human impacts on the environment, Atwood notes that there’s a sense that  “we’re clinging on by our finger nails.”  “We will kill it [the environment], and in doing so seal our own doom, because you are what you breathe and we and nature were joined by the hip all along.”

Amen.  But listen to this perspective on the importance of story-telling.  She called her talk “Bedtime Stories,” because that’s how children learn about their world from their parents.  “People are natural storytellers,” she said. “Most people will put up with almost anything to engage in an act of communication. We must narrate or die.”

“The world is uncertain, and it has been dark, and it’s always been dark at bedtime,” said Atwood. “[But] we listen better in the dark.”

We’re still mulling this over, but this story resonates with our work on whales.  Killer whales are rare among mammals in that they possess what can only be called culture.  Our colleagues have shown that different families use different dialects, and that mothers teach their calves their vocal repertoire in much the same way that we learn our stories from our parents.  Much of our work now focusses on increasing levels of human-made ocean noise that hinders the ability of whales to communicate with one another.  Ocean noise is the aquatic equivalent of turning out the lights.  We’re still struggling to understand what that means for the story-telling whales we study.

Larry Pynn is publishing a special, six-part series on the State of the Salish Sea.  We are happy for our work to be included.

His piece on 18 April addresses an issue that resonates with us:  using hydrophones [underwater microphones] to measure ocean noise levels, while simultaneously collecting information on whale presence.  We are a small organization, so we really like projects that accomplish two goals for the price of one.  In BC, there has been a long tradition of using hydrophones to study killer whales.  Our colleague, Dr John Ford at DFO, used hydrophones to discover that each killer whale family has its own unique dialect.  That game-changing information launched countless follow-on projects, and has been instrumental in building a case that killer whales, like humans, possess culture.

Of course, many of our colleagues along the BC and Washington coast have been using hydrophones to monitor whale habitat usage for decades.  You’re familiar with most of them (and apologies for missing anyone out).  OrcaLab’s Orca-Live project is one of the most famous, but you should also check out BeamReach, CetaceaLab, Salmon Coast Field Station, Pacific Wild, Center for Whale Research, and the Vancouver Aquarium’s WildWhales program, all of whom use hydrophones to monitor whale usage along the coast.

So what’s new?  Why is our “yet another hydrophone project” different from other studies?  

The key difference is that we are using calibrated systems to measure noise levels.  We are not just listening to whales; we are listening to the whales’ habitat.  And because sound is as important to whales as vision is to us, whale habitat is acoustic habitat.  Think of it as measuring the quality of whale habitat.  We use “pop-ups” from Cornell University’s Bioacoustics Research Program to collect a systematic sample of underwater noise levels.  And we are working with Chris Clark and his team at Cornell to quantify how these sounds might be perceived by fin, humpback and killer whales, and to predict how much of the whales’ calls may be “masked” by chronic ocean noise levels.  The work is very much still in progress.  We are trying to reduce more than 10,000 recordings to a simple take-home message, and that takes time.  But we’re very excited to see the attention that is being paid now to ocean noise as a chronic habitat-level stressor in BC, and we’re anxious for our work to play a role in protecting key habitats for whales and other marine species that rely on a quiet ocean to survive.

Thanks for a great article, Larry.  We look forward to seeing the rest of your series.