"Sounds in the Sea" Michael Stocker (Ocean Conservation Research) The Impact of "Human Generated" Sound on Marine Life

In this episode we talk with Michael Stocker about the impact sounds in our oceans have on all marine life (including low to mid-frequency sonar, shipping traffic, and blasting). Michael is founding director of Ocean Conservation Research (Sound Science Serving the Sea), where he uses his fluency in bio-acoustics to explore the impacts of noise on ocean animals to inform ocean policy and practice toward decreasing human bio-acoustic impacts on marine habitats.

Ocean Conservation Research is focused on understanding the energy and noise impacts of the industrialization of the ocean, and its consequences on marine life. They engage in marine biological and technological research based on conservation priorities. They use the products of this research to inform the policies and practice of the public, industry, and lawmakers so that we may all become stewards of the sea.

Michael is an acoustician and naturalist by trade and a musician by avocation, he has written and spoken about marine bio-acoustics and the impacts ocean noise pollution on marine life since 1992, presenting in national and regional hearings, National/Int’l TV, radio and news publications, as well as museums, schools, and universities. His understanding of both physics and biology has proven invaluable in court testimony and legal briefs, defending the environment against the dangers of human generated noise in the sea.

Michael has been a panelist and presenter at various professional, trade, and technical conferences, presenting on bio-acoustics and technology. 
He has advised and designed environments and technical online systems for a diverse array of clients including the U.S. National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., George Lucas’ “Skywalker Ranch,” and various premier Hollywood sound and film studios.

And as a member of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) bio-acoustics committee, and an ANSI delegate to the International Standards Organization (ISO) committee on Underwater Acoustics, Michael has been developing more accurate methods of assessing and expressing the dimensions of the marine acoustic environment and the impacts of noise on marine habitats.

Michael’s book 'Hear Where We Are : Sound, Ecology, and Sense of Place' (Springer 2013) is an assembly of ideas and understandings of human and animal sound perception.

This episode includes the voice work of Seve Cardosi, Program & Production Dir

Planet Centric Media (non-profit)
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KGUA Public Radio Sonoma & Mendocino CA
KGUA 88.3FM is an independent public media station located in Gualala, CA on the Northern CA coast.

Mendonoma Whale & Seal Study
Founded by Scott & Tree Mercer to document the occurrence, diversity, & behavior of marine mammals.

Sea Storm Studios, Inc.
An audio/visual production company in the Sea Ranch, CA (US)

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;35;20
Speaker 1
Welcome to Resilient Earth Radio, where we host speakers from the United States and around the world to talk about critical issues facing our planet and the positive actions people are taking. We also let our listeners learn how they can get involved and make a difference. This is Leigh Anne Lindsey, host, filmmaker and GM of KGUA 88.3 FM independent public radio station, along with Scott and Tree Mercer of Mendonoma Whale & Seal Study in both Mendocino and Sonoma counties of Northern California.

00;00;57;14 - 00;01;29;29
Speaker 1
Welcome to Resilient Earth Radio. I'm Leigh Anne Lindsey, host and producer. And this is episode four with Michael Stocker, located in Marin County, California. As founding director of Ocean Conservation Research, which is sound science serving the sea, he is using his fluency in bio acoustics to explore the impacts of noise on ocean animals to inform ocean policy and practice toward decreasing human bio acoustic impacts on marine habitats.

00;01;30;02 - 00;02;09;10
Speaker 1
Michael is an acoustician and naturalist by trade and a musician by avocation. He has written and spoken about marine bio acoustics and the impacts ocean noise pollution on marine life since 1992, presenting in National and regional hearings national and international TV, radio and news publications, as well as museums, schools and universities. His understanding of both physics and biology has proven invaluable in court testimony and legal briefs, defending the environment against the dangers of human generated noise in the sea.

00;02;09;12 - 00;02;52;10
Speaker 1
Michael has been a panelist and a presenter at various professional, trade and technical conferences, presenting on bio acoustics and technology. He has advised and designed environments and technical online systems for a diverse array of clients, including the US National Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch, and various premier Hollywood sound and film studios, and as a member of the American National Standards Institute's Bio Acoustics Committee, otherwise known as ANC, and an ANC delegate to the International Standards Organization or ISO Committee on Underwater Acoustics.

00;02;52;12 - 00;03;11;14
Speaker 1
Michael has been developing more accurate methods of assessing and expressing the dimensions of the marine acoustic environment and the impacts of noise on marine habitats. Michael, great to have you here on Resilient Earth Radio. Thanks for joining us.

00;03;11;16 - 00;03;14;29
Speaker 2
Hi there. I'm honored to be here. Thank you for this opportunity.

00;03;15;01 - 00;03;22;08
Speaker 1
I just listened to the interview you did on podcast number 21 of Rising Tide with David Halbach.

00;03;22;11 - 00;03;22;20
Speaker 2
Oh, yeah.

00;03;22;23 - 00;03;47;18
Speaker 1
Well, that got me thinking about the event that David and others at Blue Frontier did with Doctor Sylvia Earle at the Ballina event called Celebrate the Sea. And when I walked in there, you were with a bunch of others playing music with some musical instruments. And that got me thinking. What is your background in music and which instruments do you play?

00;03;47;21 - 00;04;11;16
Speaker 2
Oh gosh. Well, I am a jazz musician by piano since I've been four years old. And then I started getting into arranging and playing arrangements. So now I guess professionally I play, vibraphone, flute and bass and piano. It started early, I think my family, you know, it's kind of one of the social graces to play a musical instrument, unfortunately.

00;04;11;16 - 00;04;24;23
Speaker 2
Started me off with Miss Brightener, who was Lithuanian, and she was sharing all the joys of Stalinism with me. And so you should be put in jail through some of the.

00;04;24;26 - 00;04;45;17
Speaker 2
But it did play into my love of sound. So I was playing music, and I really wanted to be a, marine biologist. I think a lot of people who are kind of my age bracket saw Jacques Cousteau as, the mode of silence of the silent world. And, it was a lot quieter back then, actually, than it is now.

00;04;45;20 - 00;05;11;00
Speaker 2
For a lot of reasons. But he kind of misled a lot of us. It's, the ocean is, it's an acoustical environment. The reason I say it is quieter is because it was really at the apex of commercial whaling. The whale populations were just really decimated. I have a paper out that looks at how loud the ocean was prior to industrialized whaling, and it was actually noisier than it is now.

00;05;11;00 - 00;05;36;29
Speaker 2
It's just it was an actual noise. But then we started doing transoceanic shipping and the whale population started increasing. And now a number of them are almost at freewheeling levels. And these animals are noisy. I mean, they eat, they're muttering and singing and thumping and whatever. It's actually an amazing sound when you pop a hydrophone down in the water, can you hear all kinds of good things going on?

00;05;37;01 - 00;05;59;05
Speaker 1
I was just thinking your love of music and listening to tonal sounds makes you the perfect person for doing this sort of thing. Studying sound and noises in the ocean, then determining what is that human impact. Everything from seismic testing to explosions to the traffic from these ships.

00;05;59;13 - 00;06;21;02
Speaker 2
The ocean is ten times louder now than it was just 50 years ago due to shipping alone. And then, as you mentioned, seismic surveys looking for oil and gas, that is happening pretty much globally, with the exception of, you know, West coast of this continent and the East coast, who we managed to block that one. But pretty much everywhere else there's people looking for oil and gas.

00;06;21;02 - 00;06;54;09
Speaker 2
And when you find it, they start extracting and they need to monitor the deposits. And they are constantly using these seismic surveys to do that. So you can hear seismic surveys, you know, a thousand miles away. And they're just what what they do is they use these airguns that create these big kind of blasted booms.

00;06;54;12 - 00;07;02;23
Speaker 2
And that penetrates down into the substrate. And through that, they're able to read the return and find out what the state of the deposits are.

00;07;02;25 - 00;07;23;03
Speaker 1
One of your video clips on YouTube. And anybody can look these up. They're under Michael Stocker of the Ocean Conservation Research Foundation. And in there you show the miles across the United States, you know, just so that we really understand how far that sound travels.

00;07;23;05 - 00;07;42;13
Speaker 2
Yeah. So sand works really well on the ocean. That's why it's an acoustic environment. I mean, the water is not compressible. As a consequence of that, you can make a sound on the ocean. You can hear 2000 miles away. Humans are using that to our own advantage. But the marine animals have been using that too. And it's something we want to maybe get into a little bit later.

00;07;42;13 - 00;07;52;28
Speaker 2
Is that whales, the great whales, will make these really amazing low frequency sounds that you can hear 2000 miles away, you know, try to figure out what are they doing with their.

00;07;59;25 - 00;08;02;21
Unknown
Sound.

00;08;02;24 - 00;08;27;07
Speaker 2
Nature is extravagant but not wasteful. So there's a reason why they do that. One of the thoughts about this is that the great whales use those low frequency sounds, much like their toothy cousins use a high frequency sounds as a form of sonar reading their environment. So they make a low frequency sound, and it will bounce off of geologic features and come back to them like sonar.

00;08;27;07 - 00;08;48;15
Speaker 2
Except for long distance sonar. You know, that's important in the context of what we're doing with our sound in the ocean as well. Are these animals reading? Well, Chris Clark, who is probably one of the the uncles, the grand uncles of marine by our acoustics is at the Cornell University. And he put a paper out. Well, unfortunately can't really publish this because you can't do the no exception on this thing.

00;08;48;15 - 00;09;09;23
Speaker 2
But he was following whales as they migrated from place to place. In this particular case, it was from the Gulf of Alaska down to Hawaii, and it was a humpback whale. They don't just beeline it like using a compass or using stellar navigation. They go over to this seamount over here and they'll go down to this channel here and it.

00;09;09;24 - 00;09;23;28
Speaker 2
So the following geologic features, which kind of supports the hypothesis that these animals are using echolocation in long distances to try to figure out where the air.

00;09;24;01 - 00;09;30;05
Speaker 1
We'll be right back right after this message.

00;09;30;08 - 00;10;01;08
Speaker 4
Coming up on Resilient Earth Radio, Howie Garrett of the Orca Whale Sighting Network, which encourages observation to increase awareness and knowledge about the community of orcas and other marine mammals in the Puget Sound. They foster a stewardship ethic to motivate a diverse audience to take action to protect and restore their critical habitat. They believe it's time to reflect, reconnect, and respond as better caretakers of this planet.

00;10;01;10 - 00;10;35;24
Speaker 4
Tune in to Resilient Earth Radio, where we are elevating awareness about these critical topics and positive efforts through our radio show and podcast. Thanks for listening. Subscribe below and find us on Facebook and Instagram. We are Resilient Earth Radio, a project of planet centric media and.

00;10;35;27 - 00;10;50;02
Speaker 1
You had also mentioned something about how there were whales that reacted in such fear when there was an explosion and they rose to the surface too fast. Talk a little bit about that.

00;10;50;05 - 00;11;18;16
Speaker 2
I was doing a lot of acoustical design work, designing museum settings and recording studios, production facilities and things like that. And in 1992, there was a proposal to personify the entire oceans so that the U.S. military could talk to our submarines. Kind of a longer, more complicated story than that. Submarines are need to be surreptitious. And because of satellite magnetometers, they were able to sense these submarines.

00;11;18;16 - 00;11;41;10
Speaker 2
And their communication used to be with radio frequencies. The signify the ocean was the idea behind that. And they were brilliant people working behind this. But the problem is that they would be in song to find the ocean in the context of other animals, also using the ocean as a communication channel. So there were going to be some, some noise interference.

00;11;41;10 - 00;12;02;05
Speaker 2
So I was concerned about. So I started showing up at the public hearings. Yes. So that was in 92. I, Walter Munk was a guy who really was proposing this brilliant physical oceanographer. But like physical oceanographers and not biologists, he looked at animals as if they were input devices. And as long as you didn't exceed any kind of level, you were fine.

00;12;02;05 - 00;12;24;20
Speaker 2
But these animals live in that environment. If we used our residential noise control statutes around this stuff, we live in a completely different place. Anyways, this was going on for a while and then the Navy was talking about, low frequency active sonar as a way of of sensing other submarines in the ocean or what have you. Again, another low frequency signal.

00;12;24;23 - 00;12;49;22
Speaker 2
And the midst of the hearings on that, which was around 2000, there was a military exercise down in the Bahamas and a bunch like 17 big whales all washed up after that. And so there was a, you know, concern. What we found out it was, was mid frequency, not low frequency sonar but near frequency. Sorry, but a very nasty Charlie 53 sonar.

00;12;49;22 - 00;13;16;26
Speaker 2
It sounds like a 300ft fingernail on a 1000ft blackboard. I mean, just sounds horrible. And these animals were being deafened by this and rising to the surface a little too fast, and we beat. Whales will go down, you know, 1000m. I mean, the physics of that is pretty amazing. The 32 liter lung capacity gets compressed as they get down into the depths, down to about two liters of gas, of oxygen and nitrogen, what have you.

00;13;16;28 - 00;13;35;27
Speaker 2
And just like humans, if you are down and compressed that way, you have to come up slowly because you have to go through this decompression cycle. If you're, well, these animals, you know, the Navy pokes their ears out with giant ice clips and they freaked out and they wanted to breathe first and foremost, because that's what they do.

00;13;35;27 - 00;13;55;10
Speaker 2
And they rose too fast. And the gases in their bodies basically expanded. They got a case of the bands gas in the wine, and they looked like milkshakes when they came up, you know, was really horrible. Oh, so that really brought it to the public attention. You know, all of a sudden we weren't talking about this esoteric, low frequency communication systems.

00;13;55;10 - 00;13;59;24
Speaker 2
And they was using we're talking about actual animal habitat that was being compromised.

00;13;59;27 - 00;14;09;25
Speaker 1
What did you do back then to help further discussion on that? And did that lead to you creating the Ocean Conservation Research Foundation?

00;14;09;27 - 00;14;14;27
Speaker 2
Yeah, I wag my finger really hard.

00;14;15;00 - 00;14;21;07
Speaker 2
I was a science advisor for an organization called.

00;14;21;10 - 00;15;14;29
Speaker 1
Welcome to Resilient Earth Radio, where we hosted speakers from the United States and around the world to talk about critical issues facing our planet and the positive actions people are taking. We also let our listeners learn how they can get involved and make a difference. This is Lee and Lindsay, host, filmmaker, and GM of Kgou 88.3 FM independent public radio station, along with Scott and Tre Mercer of Mint and OMA Whale in seal study in both Mendocino and Sonoma counties of Northern California.

00;15;15;01 - 00;15;47;13
Speaker 1
Welcome to Resilient Earth Radio. I'm Liane Lindsay, host and producer. And this is episode four with Michael Stocker, located in Marin County, California, as founding director of Ocean Conservation Research, which is sound science serving the sea, he is using his fluency in bio acoustics to explore the impacts of noise on ocean animals, to inform ocean policy and practice toward decreasing human bio acoustic impacts on marine habitats.

00;15;47;16 - 00;16;26;24
Speaker 1
He is an acoustician and naturalist by trade and a musician by avocation. He has written and spoken about marine bio acoustics and the impacts ocean noise pollution on marine life since 1992, presenting in national and regional hearings national and international TV, radio and news publications, as well as museums, schools and universities. His understanding of both physics and biology has proven invaluable in court testimony and legal briefs, defending the environment against the dangers of human generated noise in the sea.

00;16;26;26 - 00;17;23;22
Speaker 1
Michael has been a panelist and a presenter at various professional, trade and technical conferences, presenting on bio acoustics and technology. He has advised and designed environments and technical online systems for a diverse array of clients, including the US National Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch, and various premier Hollywood sound and film studios, and as a member of the American National Standards Institute's Bio Acoustics Committee, otherwise known as ANC, and an ANC delegate to the International Standards Organization, or ISO Committee on Underwater Acoustics, Michael has been developing more accurate methods of assessing and expressing the dimensions of the marine acoustic environment and the impacts of noise on marine habitats.

00;17;23;25 - 00;17;28;28
Speaker 1
Michael, great to have you here on Resilient Earth Radio. Thanks for joining us.

00;17;29;00 - 00;17;32;13
Speaker 2
I'm here. I'm honored to be here. Thank you for this opportunity.

00;17;32;16 - 00;17;57;23
Speaker 1
I just listened to the interview you did on podcast number 21 of Rising Tide with David Halbach. Well, that got me thinking about the event that David and others at Blue Frontier did with Doctor Sylvia Earle at the Balinese event called Celebrate the Sea. And when I walked in there, you were with a bunch of others playing music with some musical instruments.

00;17;57;23 - 00;18;05;04
Speaker 1
And that got me thinking. What is your background in music and which instruments do you play?

00;18;05;07 - 00;18;29;00
Speaker 2
Oh gosh. Well, I am a jazz musician, but in piano since I've been four years old. And then I started getting into arranging and playing other instruments. So now I guess I professionally, I play, vibraphone, flute and bass and piano. It started early, I think my family, you know, it's kind of one of the social graces to play a musical instrument, unfortunately.

00;18;29;01 - 00;18;41;14
Speaker 2
Started me off with Miss Brightener, who was from Lithuania, and she was sharing all the joys of Stalinism with me. And so she'd be put in jail through some.

00;18;41;16 - 00;19;04;25
Speaker 2
That but it did play into my love of sound. So I was playing music, and I really wanted to be a, marine biologist. I think a lot of people who are kind of my age bracket saw Jacques Cousteau's, live modestly last, The Silent World, and, it was a lot quieter back then, actually, than it is now, for a lot of reasons.

00;19;04;28 - 00;19;28;15
Speaker 2
But he kind of misled a lot of us. It's, the ocean is, it's an acoustic environment. The reason I say it was quieter is because it was really at the apex of commercial whaling. The whale populations were just really decimated. I have a paper out that looks at how loud the ocean was prior to industrialized whaling, and it was actually noisier than is now.

00;19;28;15 - 00;19;54;13
Speaker 2
It's just it was natural noise. But then we started doing transoceanic shipping and the whale population started increasing. And now a number of them are almost at freewheeling levels. And these animals are noisy. I mean, they they're muttering and singing and thumping and whatever. It's actually an amazing sound when you pop a hydrophone down in the water, can you hear all kinds of good things going on?

00;19;54;15 - 00;20;16;19
Speaker 1
I was just thinking your love of music and listening to tonal sounds makes you the perfect person for doing this sort of thing. Studying sound and noises in the ocean, then determining what is that human impact. Everything from seismic testing to explosions to the traffic from these ships.

00;20;16;27 - 00;20;38;14
Speaker 2
The ocean is ten times louder now than it was just 50 years ago due to shipping alone. And then, as you mentioned, seismic surveys looking for oil and gas, that is happening pretty much globally, with the exception of the west coast of this continent and the East coast. Here we managed to block that one. But pretty much everywhere else there's people looking for oil and gas.

00;20;38;14 - 00;21;11;24
Speaker 2
And when you find it, they start extracting and they need to monitor the deposits. And they are constantly using these seismic surveys to do that. So you can hear seismic surveys, you know, a thousand miles away. And they're just what what they do is they use these airguns that create these big kind of blasted booms.

00;21;11;27 - 00;21;20;05
Speaker 2
And that penetrates down into the substrate. And through that, they're able to read the return and find out what the state of the deposits are.

00;21;20;08 - 00;21;40;15
Speaker 1
One of your video clips on YouTube. And anybody can look these up. They're under Michael Stocker of the Ocean Conservation Research Foundation. And in there you show the miles across the United States, you know, just so that we really understand how far that sound travels.

00;21;40;17 - 00;22;02;06
Speaker 2
Yeah. So sand works really well on the ocean. That's why it's an acoustic environment. I mean, water is not compressible. As a consequence of that, you can make a sound on the ocean. You can hear 2000 miles away. Humans are using that to our own advantage. But the marine animals have been using that too. And it's something we want to maybe get into a little bit later is that whales are great whales.

00;22;02;06 - 00;22;10;12
Speaker 2
We'll make these really amazing low frequency sounds that you can hear 2000 miles away, you know, try to figure out what are they doing with their.

00;22;17;07 - 00;22;20;04
Unknown
Some.

00;22;20;07 - 00;22;46;17
Speaker 2
Nature's extravagant but not wasteful. So there's a reason why they do that. One of the thoughts about this is that the great whales use those low frequency sounds, much like their toothy cousins use a high frequency sounds as a form of sonar, as reading their environment. So they make a low frequency sound and it will bounce off of geologic features and come back to them like sonar, except for long distance sonar.

00;22;46;19 - 00;23;05;29
Speaker 2
You know, that's important in the context of what we're doing with our sound in the ocean as well. Are these animals reading? Well, Chris Clark, who is probably one of the the uncles, the grand uncles of marine bio acoustics, is at the Cornell University. And he put a paper out. Well, unfortunately can't really publish this because you can't do no exception on this thing.

00;23;05;29 - 00;23;26;28
Speaker 2
But he was following whales as they migrated from place to place. In this particular case, it was from the Gulf of Alaska down to Hawaii, and it was a humpback whale. They don't just beeline it like using a compass or using stellar navigation. They go over to this seamount over here and they'll go down to this channel here.

00;23;26;28 - 00;23;41;10
Speaker 2
And so the following geological features, which kind of supports the hypothesis that these animals are using echolocation at long distances to try to figure out where the air.

00;23;41;13 - 00;23;47;17
Speaker 1
We'll be right back right after this message.

00;23;47;20 - 00;24;18;22
Speaker 4
Coming up on Resilient Earth Radio, Howie Garrett of the Orca Whale Sighting Network, which encourages observation to increase awareness and knowledge about the community of orcas and other marine mammals in the Puget Sound. They foster a stewardship ethic to motivate a diverse audience to take action to protect and restore their critical habitat. They believe it's time to reflect, reconnect, and respond as better caretakers of this planet.

00;24;18;24 - 00;24;42;05
Speaker 4
Tune in to Resilient Earth Radio, where we are elevating awareness about these critical topics and positive efforts through our radio show and podcast. Thanks for listening. Subscribe below and find us on Facebook and Instagram. We are Resilient Earth Radio, a project of planet centric media.

00;24;42;07 - 00;24;53;08
Speaker 4
And.

00;24;53;11 - 00;25;07;19
Speaker 1
You had also mentioned something about how there were whales that reacted in such fear when there was an explosion and they rose to the surface too fast. Talk a little bit about that.

00;25;07;22 - 00;25;35;29
Speaker 2
I was doing a lot of acoustical design work, designing museum settings and recording studios, production facilities and things like that. And in 1992, there was a proposal to sign off for the entire oceans so that the U.S. military could talk to our submarines, kind of a longer, more complicated story than that. Submarines are need to be surreptitious. And because of satellite magnetometers, they were able to sense these submarines.

00;25;36;00 - 00;25;58;24
Speaker 2
And their communication used to be with radio frequencies. They have sonar. Finally, ocean was the idea behind that. And they were brilliant people working behind this. But the problem is that they would be in song to find the ocean in the context of other animals, also using the ocean as a communication channel. So there were going to be some, some noise interference.

00;25;58;24 - 00;26;01;26
Speaker 2
So I was concerned about. So I started showing up at the public hearings.

00;26;02;28 - 00;26;29;00
Speaker 2
Yes. So that was in 92. I, Walter Mote was the guy who really was proposing this, a brilliant physical oceanographer. But like physical oceanographers and not biologists who looked at animals as if they were input devices. And as long as you didn't exceed any kind of level, you were fine. But these animals live in that environment. If we use our residential noise control statutes around this stuff, we can live in a completely different place.

00;26;29;02 - 00;26;56;22
Speaker 2
Anyways, this was going on for a while and then the Navy was talking about, low frequency active sonar as a way of of sensing other submarines in the ocean or what have you. Again, another low frequency signal. And the midst of the hearings on that, which was around 2000, there was a military exercise down in the Bahamas and a bunch like 17 great whales all washed up after their.

00;26;56;25 - 00;27;18;14
Speaker 2
And so there was, you know, concern. What we found out it was, was mid frequency, not low frequency. Sorry but frequency. Sorry, but a very nasty Charlie 53 sonar. It sounds like a 300ft fingernail on 1000ft blackboard. I mean, just sounds horrible. And these animals were being deafened by this and rising to the surface a little too fast.

00;27;18;14 - 00;27;43;19
Speaker 2
I will beat whales will go down, you know, 1000m. I mean, the physics of that is pretty amazing. The 32 liter lung capacity gets compressed as they get down into the depths, down to about two liters of gas of oxygen and nitrogen, what have you. And just like humans, if you are down and compressed that way, you have to come up slowly because you have to go through this decompression cycle here.

00;27;43;21 - 00;28;05;06
Speaker 2
Well, these animals, you know, the Navy pokes their ears out with giant ice plates and they freaked out and they wanted to breathe first and foremost, because that's what they do. If they rose too fast and the gases in their bodies basically expanded, they got a case of the bands, get them the line, and they look like milkshakes when they came up, you know, it was really horrible.

00;28;05;08 - 00;28;17;11
Speaker 2
Oh, so that really brought it to the public attention. You know, all always said we weren't talking about this esoteric low frequency communication systems. And he was using we're talking about actual animal habitat that was being compromised.

00;28;17;14 - 00;28;27;09
Speaker 1
What did you do back then to help further discussion on that? And did that lead to you creating the Ocean Conservation Research Foundation?

00;28;27;11 - 00;28;32;11
Speaker 2
Yeah, I wag my finger really hard.

00;28;32;13 - 00;28;56;24
Speaker 2
I was a science advisor for an organization called see, Slow Down Here. It was a kind of community organization that was talking about this noise pollution issue. But after a number of years of doing that, I realized I needed to roll up my sleeves and get into it. So 2007 founded Ocean Conservation Research and started really looking into it from a scientific standpoint, but also from a policy standpoint and getting funding to do this.

00;28;56;27 - 00;29;19;02
Speaker 2
The community oriented nonprofit was great because people were being informed about it, and it was a fun organization to be with. But to really get into this guide to go to Washington, D.C., I had to talk to Navy people. There's a lot of stuff I had to do, and I needed to kind of do it without the impediments of or the trappings of a, a fun community organization.

00;29;19;02 - 00;29;23;00
Speaker 2
And it'll be even more serious than that. Yeah, yeah.

00;29;23;03 - 00;29;39;09
Speaker 1
And did you have a question for I'm Terry? I was just wondering if you could talk about how the sound interferes with the behavior of whales who rely on acoustics for communication, maybe for finding mates?

00;29;39;12 - 00;29;49;19
Speaker 2
Well, as I mentioned at the outset, is that the ocean's acoustic environment light doesn't really penetrate that far in the ocean. You know, a few hundred feet down. It's pretty dark down there, except.

00;29;49;19 - 00;29;52;22
Speaker 1
For the bioluminescence, which you had mentioned in another.

00;29;52;24 - 00;30;10;08
Speaker 2
Yeah. Well, but but even in that, I mean, if you have a real bioluminescent setting, you have a lot of life in the water, you might be able to see that, you know, it looks gorgeous. Yeah. It looks like the heavens, you know, stars in it. But you can always see that stuff for, you know, a few meters.

00;30;10;08 - 00;30;35;04
Speaker 2
You can't really. And these animals need to depending upon the species, but they need to communicate over longer distances that they need to sense where they are. So there's a number of different really fantastic adaptations. We have basically these pressure sensors zoom in, which are basically the little eardrums that sense variations in pressure around us that is, can be sensed in the ocean.

00;30;35;04 - 00;30;56;11
Speaker 2
But there's also what we call particle motion, which is at a molecular level when because water is not compressible. Nonetheless, acoustical energy does transmit through it. So it's like if you scratch your finger on the top of your desktop, you can kind of hear it. But if you put your ear down on the desktop itself, it's very loud.

00;30;56;12 - 00;31;22;17
Speaker 2
Yes. So the coupling is a lot better in the same thing in the ocean and animals have adapted in a lot of different ways to this. Some I would advance, we don't really quite understand. For example, if you have a fish swimming in a very frisky breath, there's a lot of bubbles, there's a lot of noise or a hash, and all of a sudden this little caddis fly lands on top and the fish turns around and grabs it.

00;31;22;17 - 00;31;47;03
Speaker 2
Well, how can distinguish that can fly acoustically in this stochastic noise? The supposition is that that kind of fly is creating a coherent sound field that actually comes at it. And in the midst of all this noise, they hear something that's coherent, and then that's how we sense it. Well, you know, what are the organs that do that?

00;31;47;03 - 00;32;07;29
Speaker 2
They have these lateral lines. Some of them have swim bladders. That coupled with their hearing organisms, they have a number of different inputs for this. And it's the same thing over the whales. And that whales have mammal ears. They have an audio capsule that has, cochlear in it and what we have. But yes, there are other organs which we're not quite sure of.

00;32;07;29 - 00;32;36;01
Speaker 2
I mean, their body is close to the density of water. So when sound impinges on their body, it's likely that they feel it in their body as well. And then I was involved in a necropsy of a gray whale. And there is a really amazing organ that nobody quite knows what it is. But down the rostrum is this kind of envelope of bone that has in it what is acoustical lipids.

00;32;36;03 - 00;33;04;01
Speaker 2
But that doesn't terminate into a moving thing. It terminates into a porous process in front of the cranium. We don't know what that does. It's it's quite an elegant organ but and I can only presume that it has something to do with sound because the lipids that it's made of is fatty material is very similar to the lipids that dolphins have in their jaws, which conduct the sound back to their hearing, organs.

00;33;04;03 - 00;33;09;29
Speaker 2
But there's no way you can test this. You can't, you know, take it out of a whale and and see if they bump into things.

00;33;10;00 - 00;33;34;03
Speaker 1
It's right. Right, right, right. That's fascinating. They know that. And, just shows there's so much more to be learned. And it isn't easy yet. There was a nother thing to kind of maybe it's related to. But I was talking with a neuroscientist the other day on a different show who studies the brains of horses, and he was talking about cortisol levels.

00;33;34;10 - 00;33;41;03
Speaker 1
And that's something you also mentioned in one of your clips on YouTube about the cortisol levels in their brains.

00;33;41;06 - 00;33;57;25
Speaker 2
You know, cortisol is basically a proxy for stress. Yeah. And so we're trying to figure out, you know, what is it? You know, it was really only in the 90s where we started thinking about, well, we're making a lot of noise in the ocean. How is it impacting the critters there? But by that time the noise is already there.

00;33;57;25 - 00;34;25;28
Speaker 2
So we don't really have any way to do a comparative analysis between sound and no sound. But the situation came up right after the 9/11 thing. Susan Park has been studying North Atlantic right whales in a lab up in the Bay of Fundy area, and she had also up there Rosalind Roland, who was studying the cortisol levels in the faces of these North Atlantic right whales, just to kind of measure the stress.

00;34;26;01 - 00;34;53;01
Speaker 2
And so they had these two parallel studies going on. Susan was studying the acoustics by acoustics, and then all of a sudden 9/11 happens and they shut down shipping globally for, 6 or 7 days. I'm like that. And the cortisol levels immediately dropped. And then when the shipping started again, they started rising. So it was pretty clear correlation between shipping noise and the stress levels of the North Atlantic.

00;34;53;01 - 00;35;01;03
Speaker 2
Right. We.

00;35;01;06 - 00;35;40;18
Speaker 4
Coming soon on Resilient Earth Radio, we talked to Happy Whale project, which has now identified the majority of living humpback whales in the entire ocean basin and which provides critical research and knowledge for policies and protections. Now, back to our show with Michael Stocker from Marin County, California, founding director of Ocean Conservation Research. He is using his fluency in bio acoustics to explore the impacts of noise on ocean animals and to inform ocean policy and practice toward decreasing human bio acoustic impacts on marine habitats.

00;35;40;23 - 00;35;55;03
Speaker 4
Thanks for listening to Resilient Earth Radio. Find us on Facebook and Instagram or wherever you get your podcasts.

00;35;55;06 - 00;36;07;20
Speaker 1
And.

00;36;07;23 - 00;36;11;06
Speaker 1
Maybe. Hey Scott, that you have something that you want to say?

00;36;11;06 - 00;36;22;28
Speaker 5
Hi, Michael. You were at our first symposium up in Mendocino High School. You're in the middle of a talk, and you were mentioning that, right? Whale work in the Bay of Fundy when the fire alarm went off with the strobe lights and.

00;36;23;00 - 00;36;24;11
Speaker 2
I remember that it.

00;36;24;11 - 00;36;27;05
Speaker 5
Was that talk about annoying acoustics.

00;36;27;07 - 00;36;30;03
Speaker 1
And that was the first ocean life, simply.

00;36;30;10 - 00;36;33;03
Speaker 5
The very first one up there, and the only one we gave live.

00;36;33;07 - 00;36;37;12
Speaker 1
Right, right. It's been, broadcast on radio and YouTube since.

00;36;37;17 - 00;36;58;21
Speaker 5
Yeah. So I was just going to bring that up, but, I do have another one, at the Galveston Marine Mammal Biennial. Chris Clark. So I'm glad you mentioned his name. Already gave a talk with a number of naval officers about blue whales because they had just declassified information from the submarine listening stations along the East coast.

00;36;58;23 - 00;37;17;15
Speaker 5
And Chris made a comment. I'm vocally compromised myself right now. But Chris made a statement to the crowd of us there that a blue whale could form sounds, blast them out toward the East Coast, and the returning information would give the blue whale an image of the East Coast of the United States.

00;37;17;17 - 00;37;47;01
Speaker 2
That's kind of what I was implying, Chris. It's you know, this is a hoax. This is one of those things you can't really do a null hypothesis on it because the wavelengths are long. The animals are big. You can't take the sense organs out and send it back, and you can't block the sound. But the behavior would infer that these animals are using this as a long distance sonar, that they're sensing their surroundings using a sound.

00;37;47;03 - 00;38;16;11
Speaker 2
The blue whales are interesting. That whole family, the Blue Sea, came really sneaky whales. They're interesting for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that they pulse, and when they're pulsing, we're talking about they're feeding at distances that are large enough that the pulses essentially are a long way from each other. But from their own particular position they may be synchronizing.

00;38;16;13 - 00;38;37;29
Speaker 2
I have a piece I put out. I have to really to confirm it. Where there's one minke whale pulsing, you know, pretty fast, and all of a sudden a second one comes in and immediately the in train. So what's happening there? My speculation is like crickets. You know how to crickets synchronize. You go outside in a nice warm summer night.

00;38;38;04 - 00;39;09;01
Speaker 2
Crickets are all going you know, how do they synchronize? Because their hearing organs are on their elbows. So they're making noise with their wings. The noise they're making is so much louder. Right. They're they're elbows. Then a cricket that's two meters away. They're synchronizing with it nonetheless. So how are they doing that? Well, it turns out when crickets are creaking, they have a neurological blanking that blanks their hearing organs so they can't hear what they're picking.

00;39;09;04 - 00;39;36;18
Speaker 2
So how does that help them if they want to synchronize with something, you know, two meters away, they just basically adjust their creaking so that they can't hear anything. And that means all of them, when they're creaking away, they can't hear each other. So why is that helps them? Well, if if I end up like coming into the scene and the cricket that's nearest me goes, oh, so I'm pulling on and slows down a little bit.

00;39;36;20 - 00;39;46;13
Speaker 2
All of the other crickets will hear that their little brother is out of the synchronization zone, so they know something's going on there. So they create a community ear point.

00;39;46;13 - 00;40;16;21
Speaker 1
You make some thought provoking comments. Michael, this is Michael Stocker, founder of the Ocean Conservation Research. He studies sounds and noises in the ocean and especially, the sounds that the ocean life makes and the impact on sea life. And this is resilient. Earth radio on KGO 88.3 FM. I'm Liane Lindsey, along with Scott and Terry Mercer of Men, Dynamo, Whale and Seals, study and Michael.

00;40;16;21 - 00;40;41;22
Speaker 1
Some of the things that you were saying remind me of what Howie Garrett was talking to us about, that the Orca network. You know what? How they communicate with each other and maybe how Toki Thai may have been communicating with her pod, but it's just so fascinating. You get us to think about crickets and just the way that animals or sea life communicate or insects.

00;40;41;25 - 00;40;53;07
Speaker 1
So continue on this, and I want to hear to some of the latest findings that you were coming across, and some of the important things our audience might need to know about.

00;40;53;09 - 00;41;19;19
Speaker 2
Okay. Yeah. Well, I mean, so the synchronization thing is interesting, the monkey whale pulsing recording that I have, it seems that these arrows are in training with each other. So it could be the Mickey whales are like the giant versions of the crickets, synchronizing with each other so that they somehow manage to convey information through their time relationship with their pulsing.

00;41;19;21 - 00;41;29;06
Speaker 2
And I have a sound recording of these animals sped up in high speed, and they kind of says they sound like cicadas.

00;41;29;08 - 00;41;29;25
Speaker 1
Well, so.

00;41;29;25 - 00;41;52;10
Speaker 2
It's, so it's, it seems pretty clear to me. I just need to verify this. The recording I have, most of the recordings are there's one hydrophone. So we're trying to put together a situation where we have two hydrophones and then we can do time correlation for the 22, you know triangulate but also listen and find out where these animals are and find out if they are synchronizing relative to each of their bodies.

00;41;52;14 - 00;41;54;16
Speaker 2
And I think we can we can prove.

00;41;54;16 - 00;42;05;00
Speaker 1
That now, we didn't ask you this in advance, but do you have that sound available to play monkey whale synchronization. Pulsing. Pulsing.

00;42;05;06 - 00;42;27;29
Speaker 2
Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the things that also substantiates this is, Manolo Castillo has been studying marine mammals for a long time. He's he's working up on Alaska right now with belugas. He has been for a long time. So he was tracking the migration of fin whales. There were up in, you know, towards Italy where they're migrating down towards Gibraltar.

00;42;28;02 - 00;42;56;07
Speaker 2
And he was tracking them. And for the first couple of years, they did a natural migration. But the third year they went halfway down and then they returned. So what's going on there? So he had to scan around a little bit. He found that there was, seismic surveys happening off of Spain at that time for looking for oil, gas, the fin whales, they pulse they pulse every maybe 12 to 15 seconds with fin whales.

00;42;56;09 - 00;43;22;14
Speaker 2
And if they're synchronizing with each other, pulsing. Now we have a pulsing that's going on. Also seismic surveys every 12 to 15 seconds off of, Spain. But if entrainment is kind of an acknowledgment that you're there, that seismic survey pulses were not in training, they were just incessant. And so the speculation here again, it's one of the things you can't really prove one way or the other.

00;43;22;14 - 00;43;40;02
Speaker 2
But, you know, informed speculation was that the fin whales were coming down from the Algerian sea. They're pulsing. They heard this other pulse, but there was no entrainment. It's like, oh my God, those guys are psycho. You let's get out of here. Yeah. And they went back to where they started. So they missed breeding year.

00;43;40;04 - 00;43;42;16
Speaker 1
They missed a breeding year because of that.

00;43;42;19 - 00;43;43;06
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00;43;43;08 - 00;43;44;07
Speaker 1
That's that's it.

00;43;44;07 - 00;43;47;18
Speaker 2
So let me sit here. If I could share the screen and the sound.

00;43;47;20 - 00;44;06;05
Speaker 1
All right. And again this is Kagara in Molalla 88.3 FM. We are broadcasting from studios in well la la on the southern tip of Mendocino on the coast north of Sonoma Coast, talking with Michael Stocker today of the Ocean Conservation Research. Go ahead Michael.

00;44;06;12 - 00;44;23;26
Speaker 2
Okay, so this is sped up times ten. But these are minke whales and they sound a lot like cicadas.

00;44;23;29 - 00;44;26;22
Speaker 1
They really do sound like cicadas.

00;44;26;24 - 00;44;28;05
Speaker 2
Big surprise there.

00;44;28;06 - 00;44;31;08
Speaker 1
And again that was the minke whales, not the fin whales.

00;44;31;11 - 00;44;34;29
Speaker 2
Yeah, that's Nikki's the cousins. You know, they're all shaped like fast missiles.

00;44;35;01 - 00;44;39;15
Speaker 1
The minky is the smallest whale as well as baleen. Baleen as well.

00;44;39;23 - 00;44;50;13
Speaker 2
So this is in training. Wow.

00;44;50;15 - 00;44;52;07
Speaker 2
So let me see if it.

00;44;52;10 - 00;44;53;15
Speaker 1
That's like a heartbeat.

00;44;53;15 - 00;45;13;17
Speaker 2
Yeah. So you have a single minky pulsing. Yeah. And then the second one comes in and you hear the. Well, the paper that I put together on this thing, the reason why they're out of sync, there's like, two is because they were two different distances from the hydrophone.

00;45;14;20 - 00;45;36;00
Speaker 2
If they were themselves. We had a hydrophone on one of them, the second one to come in, and then you would see their sink. That I prove this because I looked at both the distance between the two different pulses and calculated how long sound would have traveled. And then I also looked at the attenuation of the second one versus the first one.

00;45;36;05 - 00;45;48;03
Speaker 2
And there's a correlation between the distance that sound is traveling and the attenuation that would have happened over that just in the water. So here it is a little louder here okay.

00;45;48;05 - 00;45;57;18
Speaker 2
This one. Two.

00;45;57;20 - 00;46;00;13
Speaker 2
So I don't know if you could hear it clearly, but.

00;46;00;15 - 00;46;05;19
Speaker 1
Oh we could. Very good. Then explain what they're doing by doing this.

00;46;05;22 - 00;46;31;13
Speaker 2
Well I mean it could be because that first one that was sped up times ten, you could hear that they were changing their time context with each other. And what are they communicating with that. Yeah. We can only suppose I mean, there's a lot of things they would be communicating, you know, their relative distance to each other. They could be inferring something about other navigation cues are important or where food is or what have you.

00;46;31;16 - 00;46;39;10
Speaker 2
There's no way we can ask them as which of these says, you know, if we can understand what they were saying, we wouldn't know what they were talking about, right?

00;46;39;10 - 00;46;42;28
Speaker 1
If we could just talk to the whales, talk the animal.

00;46;43;00 - 00;46;44;24
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00;46;44;27 - 00;46;46;19
Speaker 1
We'll be right back. Right after this.

00;46;46;19 - 00;47;00;12
Speaker 4
Information.

00;47;00;14 - 00;47;02;15
Speaker 4
I.

00;47;02;17 - 00;47;44;06
Speaker 4
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00;47;44;08 - 00;48;24;17
Speaker 4
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00;48;24;19 - 00;48;55;03
Speaker 1
So we're talking about a couple of different things. We're talking about the sounds that these sea creatures make. But we're also talking about the impact of human noise to in the ocean. And I wanted to kind of get back to that for a moment, just because there is so much that is continuing happening in our oceans, like deep sea mining discussions and the oil rigs and the wind turbine platforms that are being developed off of Humboldt and coming down to Mendocino County.

00;48;55;03 - 00;49;03;29
Speaker 1
So can you address some of that? Michael, what you think about that extra noise level that's being introduced to the ocean?

00;49;04;01 - 00;49;30;18
Speaker 2
Yeah, this is really important. I mean, I animals could like like the fish swimming in the frisky brook. They may be able to sort out useful sounds versus noise. Not useful. And they may be able to do it. And you know what? We in our terrestrial environment, there's a thing called masking or the cocktail party effect, where at some point in time you don't want to compete with the noise around you because you can't understand what's happening, just too much noise.

00;49;30;20 - 00;50;00;07
Speaker 2
They may have ways of filtering out coherent versus incoherent or useful versus not useful sounds. We don't know that the ocean is really noisy. John Hildebrandt had done a lot of studies in terms of the kind of the listening range ability of whales, but in terms of the offshore wind stuff, I've been working on offshore wind for the past couple of years now, and the more I got into it, the more I started to say, you know, it's it's not as clear cut.

00;50;00;07 - 00;50;29;01
Speaker 2
A benefit of basically unplugging the oil pipeline and plugging in electrical power cable and heading towards the same cliffs. I mean, right, the challenge here is that the noises that are being made, we managed to jam up the works in the 2017 to 2022, five year offshore oil leasing program. In the last administration, the drill baby drill guys wanted to basically completely, surveyed the entire Atlantic coast.

00;50;29;02 - 00;50;53;20
Speaker 2
But we got on the way there because it was really it's noisy. We're basically having these seismic surveys going on all the time was going to be challenging for the animals that live there. And I working with Oceana and Southern Environmental Law Center and at Surfrider in North Carolina, we managed to gum up the works, and they weren't able to realize that particular desire of theirs to survey the entire Atlantic.

00;50;53;24 - 00;51;17;19
Speaker 2
But that was just with airguns. What they're proposing now in Atlantic and also out here. Well, and actually in the Atlantic is pile driving for these turbines. Right. That's the same thing. We're going to have thousands of a lot of piles and various types banging away for years. That's not a healthy thing. Exactly. That's out there. Out here is a slightly different story because it's deeper water.

00;51;17;19 - 00;51;40;26
Speaker 2
They can't put piles out there. And, you know, water gets, you know, 1000ft deep. But the concern I have wherever these turbines are and people are not paying attention to and I have a paper I just submitted a couple weeks ago that looks at the infrasonic or low frequency noise that is generated by turbine. That's what a turbine blades.

00;51;40;26 - 00;51;41;20
Speaker 1
Yeah.

00;51;41;22 - 00;52;15;00
Speaker 2
And helicopters are really noisy. You hear that flapping of the blade. But you know, if you're sensitive to a sound environment, you can actually hear before it arrives. Something's going on. And what is that? That's this low frequency sound, which is not something we actually hear because we only hear from, you know, at the low 20s, cycles per second, low 20Hz, we hear it as a rhythm and not as a tone, but below that we can sense an oscillation of low frequency sounds.

00;52;15;02 - 00;52;46;09
Speaker 2
And it's stuff that affects our lungs. It oscillates our lungs and kind of cavities in our stomach, our gut, this energy down there that affects us biologically. And there's a lot of it. And that's a helicopter. Well, if you have a blade that's 300ft across, it's still creating that something which just sits so low, instead of having it being at one hertz or, you know, five hertz or whatever, it's like one cycle, every 10s, you know, point one hertz, and there's a lot of energy there.

00;52;46;12 - 00;53;13;18
Speaker 2
So now we have 3000 on the Atlantic. But over here, because there's a Humboldt, is that Morro Bay. And I guess the Mendocino Coast is being planned as well. You have hundreds of these things flapping away. Now, we're in a situation where that and low frequency noise penetrates into the ocean and interferes with the whales low frequency vocalization.

00;53;13;20 - 00;53;15;11
Speaker 2
We don't know what's going to happen.

00;53;15;13 - 00;53;17;14
Speaker 1
Will it disturb their travel?

00;53;17;16 - 00;53;31;13
Speaker 2
Yeah, that that it will, potentially interfere their ability to be able to navigate. Certainly. You know, I was talking to a bunch of bird people because it's not just below the water, it's above the water where birds need to sense pressure variations in.