Rising Human-Generated Noise Impacts Marine Life (worse if deep sea mining, offshore drilling, & windmills get green lit) We Talk with Michael Stocker, Ocean Conservation Research Founder/Director

The ocean isn't silent—it's a symphony of natural sounds that marine life depends on for survival. But human-generated noise pollution is drowning out this essential communication network with potentially devastating consequences. Michael takes us deep into the world of marine bioacoustics, revealing how political decisions directly impact ocean ecosystems. With three decades of experience studying underwater sound, Stocker paints a vivid picture of the challenges facing marine life today. We explore the shocking effects of military sonar on beaked whales, where intense acoustic disturbances cause animals to surface too quickly, resulting in catastrophic internal injuries similar to decompression sickness in human divers. Stocker describes how their bodies appeared like "milkshakes inside" during necropsies—a graphic reminder of how sound can kill. The conversation turns to innovative solutions, including Stocker's groundbreaking work using wavelet analysis to precisely track whale movements near shipping lanes. This technology could revolutionize marine mammal protection by allowing ships to "see" whales on their navigation systems and avoid collisions without necessarily slowing down—a win for both conservation and commerce. Climate change compounds these acoustic challenges, with melting Arctic ice eliminating crucial feeding grounds for gray whales. Whether discussing non-cavitating propeller designs that could dramatically reduce vessel noise or the devastating impact of bottom trawling on marine habitats, Stocker provides both expertise and hope. His parting advice offers meaningful action for listeners. Sites: https://ocr.org/ & https://ocean-noise.com/

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Michael Stocker
• 8:09 Political Threats to Ocean Protection
• 16:56 Offshore Drilling and Seismic Surveys
• 24:16 Noise Pollution and Marine Life
• 34:15 Sound Recognition Technology
• 45:19 Climate Change and Marine Mammals
• 50:05 Bottom Trawling and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 0:10

Welcome to the Resilient Earth Podcast, where we talk with speakers from the United States and around the world about the critical issues facing our planet and the positive actions people are taking, and the positive actions people are taking. The music for this podcast is by Eric Alleman, an international composer, pianist and writer living in the Sea Ranch. You can find Resilient Earth on Spotify, apple and Amazon Podcasts, iheartradio, youtube, soundcloud and wherever you find your podcasts. Today we are talking with Michael Stocker, founder and director of Ocean Conservation Research in Marin County.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 1:07

He has written and spoken about marine bioacoustics and the impacts ocean noise pollution has on marine life since 1992. We dive first into how US politics could cause major havoc to all ocean life by increasing the noise pollution levels through offshore drilling, wind turbines and deep sea mining. He speaks with us in this episode just before he left last week for Prague in the Czech Republic to attend the 7th International Conference on the Effects of Noise on Aquatic Life. That and more coming up next. It's good to have you back on the show again, michael, and again so much going on in our country. And, in fact, tree, why don't you bring up the topic that you were just discussing?

Theresa (Tree) Mercer: 2:08

We know that recently there was a public comment period that ended on June 16th about the offshore oil and gas drilling and you posted your comment on your website and I was most impressed by what you wrote and you know I just thought you hit all those essential points so extremely well.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 2:31

So if you want to tell us more about that, and also the bills that are right now in the process of being amended, two of them which directly affect the marine protected areas.

Michael Stocker: 2:44

Well, I mean, these guys really want to tear it all up as fast as possible, and every five years they have to put out a leasing plan and review and they are supposedly to bring in the most current information. And the last time in 2017, they came out with a plan and they had a fairly systematic approach where they were going to start in the South Atlantic and then they were going to move to the Gulf and then to California and then to Alaska, working with Oceana and Southern Environmental Law Center and Surfrider of North Carolina, and we worked on it for years. But we managed to jam up the works and Oceana is particularly good at basically soliciting public support and when we had Republican representatives on the House floor giving noise demonstrations, we knew we had them and so we thwarted that whole plan. Then the next administration came in in 2022 when the review came up again, and fortunately I think largely due to the efforts of Bernie Sanders when he realized that he's not going to win the White House after the New Hampshire win, because the New York Times basically put out 11 hit pieces on him in 24 hours.

Michael Stocker: 4:10

So he decided to, you know, the better part of valor and he would hand his voters over to Biden if Biden moved left and so Biden did move left a little bit and we had the Inflation Reduction Act, which had a lot of great environmental bills in it. Had it not been for Joe Manchin, we would have really made a significant shift, but Joe Manchin kind of jammed up the works. But nonetheless we'd still got a lot of good things, including areas in the Outer Continental Shelf that were protected. There was only three leasing areas and there were some of the uglier provisions. This is on the 2022 bill and it was basically let out in 2023. Purportedly, we would only have another review in 27, but this administration came in and they immediately. What they did is they have a whole revised plan.

Michael Stocker: 5:05

And so they're going to drill on all coasts at the same time, and this includes doing seismic surveys in national monuments. So these guys go to the heart of the issue and they really you know they're deliberately being bulls in China shop.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 5:21

That's a good way to put it.

Michael Stocker: 5:23

Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Yeah, so, um, I'm not sure how much they're going to listen, but we managed to get 75 000 people. That, or individual comments. I mean a lot of more group comments as well. Uh, what I put out in my piece, um included the comments that were a sign-on letter from american petroleum institute and they had some 130 fossil fuel businesses that signed on to it. They have to pay attention to public comments under the National Environmental Policy Act. That's what NEPA really does is allows the public and stakeholders to comment about particular things that are going to compromise our assets, our national assets and environmental, you know out of continental shelf, of course, but also they have to put announcements out for all kinds of different things.

Michael Stocker: 6:17

If you want to look at the types of things, you can go to regulationsgov and see what's up. So you get public comments and input on the thing. And 75, 000 is pretty good. And seeing as the preponderance of them were against the proposal, there were a number of group sign-on letters put out by earth justice and the nrdc and ocn I think had one. They were basically group sign-on. A group sign-on is more sensible. And so 75,000 comments. The priests sort them by saying are you an individual, are you an organization, are you a business stakeholder? They kind of pre-qualify it. I don't know how much these guys are going to pay attention to it, because these guys are not paying attention to anything.

Michael Stocker: 6:58

We want 85% of the public is not happy right now with a lot of things and these guys are just moving ahead. Is not happy right now with a lot of things and these guys are just moving ahead? Yeah, we'll see where that goes Right now. The comments period is out for offshore mining.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 7:12

Is it deep sea mining?

Michael Stocker: 7:14

Mining. Yeah, there is this mining company that put in a request for information about leasing areas off of American Samoa and it's a horrible idea. And the reason why the United Nations Seabed Authority has formed is because these are the oceans, or I should say the ocean. Everybody's got an interest in it and we need to make sure that we take care of it. They're talking about going in. You know, rutting around in areas where we don't even know what the animals are down there. You know there's. You know, rutting around in areas where we don't even know what the animals are down there. You know there's, you know, hundreds of thousands of animals that we don't even know what their role is. So the Seabed Authority is the International Seabed Authority is has basically, been skimming the development of that.

Michael Stocker: 7:57

There was one effort off of Papua New Guinea that they started to get into and then halted because they realized that we don't even know what kind of damage we're going to be done. But with this metals company, they they're appealing to the more prurient side of the Trump administration. It's like, hey, we can turn it into money, let's go.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 8:24

And those companies are all like greenwashing too.

Michael Stocker: 8:28

In addition to getting the support from this administration, this administration and its allies are really working overtime in terms of creating alternative narratives that aren't substantiated by science, experience or the real world. I mean, an example is when christy gnome was basically saying los angeles was on fire. I had a friend who was going to la and her family. Her mom said be careful down there, it's dangerous, it's. It's like a two block area. The los angeles has got, you know, 23 million people or something that's living in it and, uh, and if you believe what these narratives these guys are creating, and it's the same thing about the environment, you know. So, anyways, one of the issues with this new seabed mining thing and again, I don't know how much these guys are going to pay attention to it, because they're still proposing in terms of the offshore drilling there was another proposal that came up just last week about doing seismic surveys in our national marine sanctuaries, and the challenge that we all have is to not tear our hair out.

Theresa (Tree) Mercer: 9:39

So true, bill, the legislations that Joe Biden just you know days before his presidency ended that I thought that was supposed to be a very permanent type of protection for this coast.

Michael Stocker: 9:52

Well, I mean, this current administration has taken a whole different playbook. Yeah, I have no idea what happened to Congress, but the Republicans absolutely have no spine at all and they're all the power is being taken away from them and I can only assume that it's not because they're worried about being primary. I have a. I have a feeling that they're worried about being sued, having thugs come in, knock their children out, whatever. I mean it's probably horrible stuff. They're really fearful. And then you have the Democrats, who also don't have any spine. You know, when Joaquin Jeffries, after Trump was elected, he says you know, presidents come and go, but God will be sitting on the throne. I mean, it's like this is not what I want to hear from you. And there's still. I mean there's really, there's great opportunities. Everybody knows, knows like 80 percent of the public is just completely aghast at this immigration thing. And what's Hakeem Jeffries saying about it? I didn't read it. So there's a handful of them. You know the handful of representatives. The Democratic Party is not reading the tea leaves right now.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 11:01

They're not reading the tea leaves leaves. Right now they're not reading the tea leaves and I want to also bring up the article that you wrote back on June 3rd that you posted on your website, on the Ocean Conservation Research website, about the National Academy of Sciences.

Michael Stocker: 11:19

It was a troubling report, oh yeah, oh right, the boats that we use, you know, the research vessels that we use. The current administration has basically put a halt to all this stuff and a lot of these boats are 40 to sometimes 60 years old and they're not suitable for modern science and we need to build them. And they take, you know, four to six years to build some of these things, sometimes even longer than that, and the current administration has decided that it doesn't want to hear about it, so they've stopped all of the construction and all funding for these ships.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 11:56

And no one from the federal government showed up to that meeting. Normally doesn't you know someone from NOAA or the National Marine Fisheries?

Michael Stocker: 12:07

the EPA, the Marine, you recall at that time, that's when Doge was going in and taking everybody's chair away. You know, people were freaked, they were fearful and they would not get funding to attend a scientific meeting. That's true. I mean I have. I have a real, real dear friend who we did a project up in Cook Inlet, manolo Casillate, and he is probably the foremost marine mammalologist on belugas generally and then he was studying a particular case up in the Cook Inlet for I don't know, 12 years.

Scott Mercer: 12:39

He had longitudinal studies on these animals.

Michael Stocker: 12:42

And they're an interesting case because they need ice to live year-round the ones in the Arctic. But when the ice retreated after the last ice age, these belugas were left in the Cook Inlet and so they have certain adaptations to that, both social and physiological. But he lost his job, they fired him and he's working for Microsoft now. You know this. This is a guy, then you know just the wealth stores of information that he has about this area, these animals, the interactions. You know his published papers are really brilliant and they let him go, are really brilliant and they let them go. And I have friends and colleagues who are in NOAA Fisheries, national Marine Fisheries Service and you know they're just keeping a real low profile right now. Either that or they're kowtowing, you know.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 13:40

I too, we knew Maria Brown. We've had her on before.

Scott Mercer: 13:46

And.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 13:46

I ran into her down at the International Ocean Film Festival at the pier there in San Francisco and she'd been moderating one of the panels and I went up to her afterwards and she said that recently they had just taken 20%. Said that recently they had just taken 20%. They didn't ask whether or not they were you know. Could she go in and reduce the poor performing ones? They took all the top scientists, she said, and they're coming for another 20%. Well, she ended up being part of that 20% and she dedicated decades of her life to that program and she was head of, she was superintendent of, both Greater Fairlawns and the Cordell Bank.

Michael Stocker: 14:33

Yeah, no, she's a gem yeah.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 14:36

Yeah.

Michael Stocker: 14:37

She dedicated her life to this. Yeah, these guys are not, you know. I mean, of course, we know the waste front of beef thing. There are a couple of people now who have come out of Doge and saying I don't know. I was in the VA, you know, and we were there for a while and we didn't really see a lot. In fact, we saw a pretty efficient running operation there.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 14:59

I heard that too, yeah.

Michael Stocker: 15:00

Yeah, those types. So I mean this is really kind of a fallout from Ronald Reagan's nine most terrifying words I'm with the government and I'm here to help ball. They don't want to level the playing field, they basically want to dominate by power, brute force. And it's to the point now where I mean I'm sure you've read all the most speculative and informed discussions about what the technocracy and the Christian right theocracy and where this is headed. You know know that these guys don't have a plan. They have an objective and their objective is to destroy the whole thing and once they destroy it, the idea is that they can reconstruct it toward their desires.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 15:59

I was just talking about that today on the show regarding a review of what happened on no King's Day protest turnout. Yeah, yeah, and the manipulative narrative that they use in gaslighting the public.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 16:15

Right founder and director of Ocean Conservation Research in Marin County, just prior to his departure to Prague to attend the 7th International Conference on the Effects of Noise on Aquatic Life. I'm Leanne Lindsay, host and producer of Resilient Earth Radio and Podcast, along with my co-host and co-producers, scott and Tree Mercer, of the Mendenoma Whale and Seal Study. Now back to the show.

Michael Stocker: 16:53

I went to the Stand Up for Science rally in San Francisco and the San Francisco Chronicle basically had a helicopter out there shooting the crowd, you know, and the.

Michael Stocker: 17:04

The pictures that they published were shot probably at 11 in the morning for a rally that started at noon and their headline was hundreds showed up to stand up for science and I I mean, I did an informal count, which is easy enough to do I stood up onto the, the back of city Hall, and kind of looked over the crowds and there was at least 5,000 people there at least.

Michael Stocker: 17:30

And this happened before, you know, when we were objecting to going into Iraq. There was a rally down in San Francisco at that time as well, but the people who were the organizers knew that the press was under reporting this stuff significantly, and so they had a gateway that you had to go through and you grabbed a piece of paper from somebody and then you stuck it in a bag and you walked two steps and stuck it in a bag. So you know you're essentially separating those actions, and the and the chronicle again said you know, hundreds of people showed up to this rally. Um, when they counted the pieces of paper is over 50 000 50 000 50 000 and this is the same thing.

Michael Stocker: 18:15

You know that I've seen numbers uh shrink and grow for this, uh uh. Most recent, no Kings Act stuff. The number that the press seems happy with is 5.5 million, but I saw informal counts from 8 to 12 million people Same.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 18:37

And I only stuck with the conservative number. I may update that episode to include that data too. Well, let's, let's. Why don't we move towards another topic that I wanted to make sure that we cover, because we want to talk about sounds in the ocean, and you also attended a conference back in May. Was it in New Orleans?

Michael Stocker: 19:05

Yeah, that was a acoustic society conference and yeah, that was a lot of fun. It was a good conference and New Orleans is, I mean it's changed a lot. I first time I went to. New Orleans was in, I think, 98 or 99. And you know the hurricane that broke. You know that destroyed the war.

Michael Stocker: 19:23

It really changed a lot of things down there katrina yeah yeah, katrina, right, I mean it just changed a lot of attitudes. Because it was really clear and it seemed to be a very magnanimous place where blacks and whites got along really well, and what have you. And after katrina it was pretty clear at least the infrastructure wanted to flush all the african-americans out of there.

Michael Stocker: 19:44

Some of them are still living in trailer camps outside of town, so you know they mowed the houses down and being messed so and so that attitude is there now and I saw, you know, of course, anywhere in america a lot more people destitute out on the streets who are having a hard time. Um, but it was a good conference.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 20:08

There was a lot of kids, uh conversations going on and um, yeah, didn't it start with music acoustics and then go into animal bioacoustics?

Michael Stocker: 20:19

well the way that the acoustical society works. There's acoustics it's kind of cost cuts everywhere. There's everything from you know, uh, medical acoustics. Medical acoustics, yeah, people using ultrasound, for example, example, for both imaging and for actually doing operations, you know, using Ah right, right. So there's medical acoustics. There's acoustical oceanography, which I sometimes go into depending upon what they're doing. Architectural acoustics, musical acoustics. There is archaeological acoustics that's kind of an interesting, interesting. So there's all these different sessions. You know they're going on.

Michael Stocker: 20:59

I am a member of of the animal bioacoustics community, so I go to the AB sessions and they had some really good stuff there. I think one of the I put another piece out on on this interesting imaging system. It was both video and sound and they had these kind of spheres that had hydrophones on them and also video cameras and they were able to get like a 360 degree uh or spherical view of what was going on. So you see these fish and if you drop a high single hydrophone into a coral reef, you'll hear. You know this. You know sputtering and clarking and barking and hoots and things like that. But you don't know where that's coming from because you know we can't localize it that well. That sound travels so fast and in water that you know it really hits. We can't make this time discrimination to determine where, where it is between our ears. They uh, have, um, have the ability to be able to pinpoint where the sound comes from. So they had these schools of fish and instead of hearing this, you know, click, click, click, you know, click, click, click, click you would see where the clicks were coming from, and these fish were clearly making space, communicating with each other.

Michael Stocker: 22:12

You know, and it's going to really kind of in the way that the drones have changed our understanding of of how whales and dolphins be, and this picture behind me is, you know, it was taken with a drone. Well, these animals are playing with each other. They're just goofing off and having a heck of a time, and you know. So now we're starting to understand behavioral interactions with these animals, taken from a perspective that we have not had before, and it's giving us huge amounts of information. Well, I think that this particular 3D imaging will also allow us to 3D sound imaging will allow us to really understand how animals in the ocean interact with each other.

Michael Stocker: 23:01

You know, for example, do dolphins, do they beam information to each other? Why would I say that. Well, there's evidence, pretty clear evidence, that dolphins can eavesdrop on each other. So one dolphin will put some biosonar clicks out and then sonify a fish, and the other dolphin will go and grab it. So it's reading the reflection of another dolphin's biosonar and responding to it. So that's an interesting phenomenon of itself. But then this opens up the possibility that these dolphins could actually project images to each other through sound.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 23:51

That's amazing.

Michael Stocker: 23:53

Yeah.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 23:53

I mean really amazing how that can happen. And the more that we learn about these things, the more that hopefully people will understand also how sounds in the ocean, their human generated impact, that kind of communication.

Michael Stocker: 24:10

Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Most of the models we use in terms of impacting animal communication has to do with masking, and we see that a bit. I mean, I've got some recordings of pilot whales and dolphins, you know phonating.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 24:38

And then a boat goes through and you can hear they try to to keep up and at some point in time they just stop here's a clip from a recording about which michael is talking when it comes to the communication between pilot whales and dolphins and the masking that occurs when a vessel travels overhead and disrupts that communication, and then we'll get back into the conversation. Thank, you.

Michael Stocker: 25:53

They have adapted morphologically to this. They have in terms of their stress responses. I mean there's a lot of studies with. I mean in the late 90s they introduced a sonar technology that maybe was using that was called C53, Charlie 53. Very nasty sound.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 26:19

Now prepare your ears for this sonar sound that I'm about to play, because it is piercing, so you can just imagine how it impacts marine mammals in this acoustic environment.

Michael Stocker: 26:41

Initially what was happening. These animals were getting startled. So the first really apparent mass stranding that happened that was caused by the sonar was they were doing a military exercise down in the Bahamas and, coincident with that, some 17 beaked whales and one minke whale washed ashore. And when they did necropsies on these animals they found that their uh, the tissues in their body. I mean they look like milkshakes inside. And why was that? Well, these beaked whales, they, they dive really deep. You know they go down 5 000 feet. You know we're talking about 100 atmospheres and they have at surface they have a 32 liter lung capacity. When they go down that deep it compresses down to about two liters um and it goes into the, you know, the tissues of their body and what have you.

Michael Stocker: 27:46

And just like human divers, when they come up they need to take their time because otherwise they get the bends, you get nitrogen neis.

Michael Stocker: 27:54

So they need to take their time. But what had happened after all? The smoke had settled because initially the Navy was saying we didn't do that. That's like let's put two and two together here and find out if there might be some correlation. So it took a couple of years for people to really realize what had happened. But these animals were diving deep and then they heard this deafening, nasty signal. It was like ice picks in their ears and they freaked out and they rose because they need to breathe. They came to the surface as fast as possible. All that nitrogen necrosis happened. They, you know, just blew up their insides and they were just as I said. They would look like milkshakes inside because it was all a mess and there were a number of strandings. For a few years after that they were associated with C53, sonar and then some studies, I think Brandon Southall.

Michael Stocker: 28:53

Southall Environmental Environmental did some behavioral exposure studies on these animals and they're finding that when you warn them ahead of time that this horrible noise is coming, they leave. They leave the area.

Scott Mercer: 29:10

So they're now. They've got the program.

Michael Stocker: 29:12

They say, okay, when you hear this stuff, just get out of here. So we haven't had the catastrophic strandings, but we have now a stress response in adonisetes. That is not good for them. It's not good for them.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 29:30

I was just thinking about the impact on these marine mammals and they are already stressed enough. Scott and Tria, they've got updates on some of the whale activity along our coast right now that there's a lot that are showing up that are dead or injured, Did you guys want to just talk on that just a moment?

Theresa (Tree) Mercer: 29:58

want to just talk on that just a moment. Oh sure, the recent strandings in the bay of the grays, an unprecedented number. We're even seen going into the bay, over 30. And I think of the 30, 22 of them were dead, washed ashore dead. You know that's caused by other reasons. You know that's caused by other reasons either starvation, which led to ship strikes, most of them, unfortunately, they were either couldn't reach them to do a necropsy or too far decomposed in order to do a necropsy. But it's a pretty sad situation with what's going on with the gray whales that is. But I'm interested, michael, in if they were to start drilling again off the coast, they would have to use the sonar or seismic methods correct to find out where the spots are located.

Michael Stocker: 30:55

That's what the survey are located. That's why I wrote that up. The survey is really. They have to know where the deposits are Right. Essentially, this large air gun explosion or they usually have a number of them, up to 20. They time the explosion so they can aim the impulse, in certain ways what's favorable to what they're trying to pick up. But it's a loud explosion. I mean you can hear these things 2,000 miles away 2,000 miles, so the impact of this would be immense.

Theresa (Tree) Mercer: 31:32

Enormous because of the way sound travels. Yeah.

Michael Stocker: 31:37

Yeah, they have been doing surveys in the Gulf of Mexico for as long as they've been drilling down there and the noises are not deadly noises. It's actually pretty. It's an air gun bubble that pulses out and it's noisy. It's an explosion. It doesn't kill the whales. It does damage zooplankton Seriously. I want to do a study on this and at some point in time I will attempt to get funding and somebody and a funder with enough imagination, the bubble pulses out and that's what creates the impulse, but at some point in time it retracts.

Michael Stocker: 32:26

And what I think is happening with the zooplankton is that it retracts. And while zooplankton are built to be able to deal with pressure variations because they, you know, they dive deep and they come up to the surface at night and you know so they have a pressure gradient they can handle, what I think the problem is is when the bubble retracts, you get essentially a negative pressure gradient. They're not good for that, so it's negative. Barotrauma, as I think, is what's happening, how different animals deal with it. Dolphins don't really hear that well in that low frequency range. Trauma, as I think, is what's happening, how different animals deal with it. You know dolphins don't really hear that well in that low frequency range. And you know one of the reasons why we had to go and update the marine mammal exposure guidelines to incorporate the various hearing ranges of various animals to, you know, low frequency myositis seats and high frequency adonis seats and it's because they have different hearing regimes that they're working with.

Michael Stocker: 33:29

That was again another thing that Brandis Southall was able to introduce, and we knew we needed to do that, because when you had dolphins that were surfing on the bow waves of seismic survey vessels, obviously they were being exposed to noise that was exceeded the regulatory thresholds and they weren't being bothered by it, but it was all low frequency noise.

Michael Stocker: 33:51

On the other hand, you know, uh, the larger whales, the maestas seats, they phonate down in those lower frequencies. So they, um, you know, they obviously hear it. And how does it affect them? There was an interesting paper that was written by susan parks and rosalind roland susan's got a lab up in the bay of fundy area and, uh, and she's been studying the north atlantic right whales up there, uh recording them, and Rosalind.

Michael Stocker: 34:22

Rowland was up there. I don't know if she was out working in the same lab, but they were probably working together. What Dr Rowland was doing was measuring the cortisol levels in the feces of these whales, and cortisol is essentially a proxy for stress. Yes, and so she was measuring this. And then they were doing this. 2000, 2001, 2002, they had the 9-11 disaster and they shut down the shipping in the world for like a week and the noise levels went down and with that the stress levels went down in these animals. It was really rapid. And when the noise started coming up, then the stress levels went down in these animals. It was really rapid, and when the noise started coming up, then the stress levels started coming again so there's obviously a direct correlation between ambient noise and stress, uh, in these animals.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 35:11

So and what can be done. I mean as far as what are you doing at ocean conservation, research and what are others doing to raise the awareness about what's happening and if there's some change that can be made. And then I'd like to talk about some of the projects you've got going on.

Michael Stocker: 35:29

Yeah, well, what can be done is, I mean, raising awareness is the big thing. I mean, I first started working on this ocean noise issue in 1992. When I was telling people about noise in the ocean, they didn't have a clue. Jacques Cousteau set my business back 20 years when he came out with the series Molde Salon. It was, you know, the silent world of Jacques Cousteau.

Michael Stocker: 35:53

People thought the ocean was silent, because it's anything but silent, you know. I mean, sound works so well in the ocean that all these animals have all kinds of amazing adaptations to it in terms of sensing, you know, pressure, gradient and particle motion and being able to distinguish sounds in the time domain that allow them to navigate their surroundings in both fine pitch and large pitch ways that you know. Do we know if large whales use low frequency phonations to like biosonar, like the dolphins use high frequency? I mean it could be that they are making these noises across large distances.

Michael Stocker: 36:33

And Chris Clark, who was at Cornell, the head of their bioacoustic department up there for a long time he's retired, but he put out a paper back, oh, in early 2000 or something. It wasn't really paper, you can't because you can't really prove or disprove it, but he fought, he tracked the um migration of uh humpback whales from the gulf of alaska down to hawaii, because they breed down in hawaii and they feed up in alaska. And these animals don't just beeline it. You know they're not working on a magnetic compass, they're not looking at the stars, they head towards underwater features like a seamount or a ridge line or a trench. So the speculation which again is something that would be hard to prove because there's no null hypothesis you couldn't take the sound away and see if you know whatever they're doing, essentially echolocating with these in long wavelengths, which brings up another issue having to do with noises that we're making.

Michael Stocker: 37:35

I've got a paper that's in review right now. Actually, I got it back from a new one. I got to do the edits on the thing right now actually it's, I got it back from a new one. I gotta do do the edit something that looks at the infrasonic, which is the low frequency noise that's generated by wind farms, by wind turbines great, and it's very noisy. And the problem with that is that, as I point out in the paper, is that if it's true that whales use low frequency noise or sounds that they make to navigate around the world, and it's either either through their own signals or, you know, being able to hear the pulses of the waves on the beaches or other types of micro baroms that are happening with the swells on top of the water.

Michael Stocker: 38:20

what's going to happen if that's all masked by the noise of wind farms? And then we have birds which we know also use low-frequency barometric pressure gradients to navigate? What's going to happen to them if they have, you know, 3,000 turbines along the Atlantic Flyway and these animals which need to know, you know, is a storm front coming, Should we get in front of it or should we stick to the ground?

Michael Stocker: 38:48

If it's fluctuating, if it's unstable front, they'll hang out until the kind of wind buffets through the area and then, when they have a real honest decrease in barometric pressure, they'll get up in front of it because they can get tailwinds you can get 200 mile an hour tailwinds and it helps them migrate. But if the cues that they use to sense the barometric pressure are being masked by you know, 3000 thumping turbines, you know what's going to happen. They have this adaptive management paradigm they talk about. They have this adaptive management paradigm they talk about, which is they're doing things at a level that they can't really determine what the damage is until we start seeing it, because there's no way to test. You know how is it going to happen, but you know by that time it's going to be too late Once we start seeing that it's interfering with bird migration.

Michael Stocker: 39:39

You know how are you going to adapt to that.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 39:41

There's just so much short-term thinking versus long-term thinking.

Michael Stocker: 39:45

Yeah, yeah.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 39:46

We talked earlier about both hydrophone and the Farallons, and I believe that's one of the projects you've got going on right now.

Michael Stocker: 39:56

Yeah, we're actually working on a proof of concept for this right now. We're going to be putting hydrophone arrays out next to the shipping lanes and we'll be able to use those arrays to site in on whales who might be feeding or frolicking in the shipping lanes and be able to warn the ships that the whales are there.

Michael Stocker: 40:21

Well, they can kind of do that. Right now there's a project that the Benioff Ocean Institute is funding called Whale Safe. They have a single hydrophone and they can tell if there's whale activity in the area and then they have some really excellent behavioral models so they can determine, you know, what type of behavior is going on and where they most likely be found. The challenge that they have is that they're using what's called fast Fourier transform to identify the animal. We need to see the sound. We can't distinguish as precisely as they can the sounds that they're making. So in order to figure out what kind of animal is doing what, we need to know what they're called repertoires and then use that to inform the behavioral models. But FFT only gives you an approximation. You can kind of get a probability map of where they are. That's because that fast-forwarding transform is a mathematical process where they divide the signals up into these little frequency bands and they determine the amplitude of the sound coming out of each of those buckets and then they can use that to visualize it, to put it up on a screen and visualize it. We're using a process called wavelet analysis, and wavelet analysis is a different way of discriminating sounds. Instead of sucking them up and putting them into filter bins, we are going to be putting them into a process where they have these certain wavelet signals that interact with the signals and the interaction pattern lights up, and WaveletServe was originally designed to process huge amounts of data.

Michael Stocker: 42:08

This type of process is being used when you're doing a Zoom meeting. The picture behind me is not moving, and so once it's determined what it is, there's no extra data that needs to be processed there. The only thing that needs to be processed right now in terms of the Zoom meeting is my moving lips. Everything else is pretty much static. So the way that wavelets work is when they see something that is different in a data set, it lights it up, and things that are not different, it doesn't process it. So it allows for you know you to have a screen with 20 different people on it all talking away. That's a huge amount of data that is being processed, and they can do it using this type of technique.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 42:56

And I know you collaborate with so many other organizations. I can imagine the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito being excited about this.

Michael Stocker: 43:04

Well, everybody's excited about it. We just need to get the funders excited about it. But yeah, no, I mean I think we're pretty hot on the trail now once we have a proof of concept, Because Benioff was interested in it.

Michael Stocker: 43:18

We introduced it to them a number of years ago and they were interested in it, but they needed to them a number of years ago and they were interested in it, but they needed to see something that was more ambitious, because I was going to basically be sending out the signals and letting people deal with it themselves, and that wasn't sensible. What we're going to do is we're going to basically put out the signal into what they call an automatic identification system, AIS, which is used in the shipping industry to identify boats. So if you type in AIS systems and maritime and look at what you there's a number of different organizations that process this and you can see all the boats on the water that are larger than 60 feet. You know where they're from, what kind of vessel it is, what their heading is, what their speed is. I mean, all this stuff is on screen in the wheelhouse of your boat. It's something that we can then use those AIS signals to identify the whales that we're sighting in on and give them AIS identification numbers.

Michael Stocker: 44:17

Now we can watch them and they can show up on the screen and in the wheelhouses of these ships and they can steer clear. They can see them, they can steer clear. So the way that the whale save system informs skippers is when there's a lot of whale activity, they can slow down voluntarily. The challenge with that is if they have a tight schedule to meet, it costs money and in this particular case, if they knew where the whales are, they can actually steer clear of them, they can avoid them and they won't have to slow down. I have a pal who's a skipper. He's got an organization called BayQuest. They're doing scientific studies in the Bay, but he's a skipper and he's been working 100-ton license and he said you know, this thing is going to completely change the game for whales in the ocean.

Michael Stocker: 45:04

So that's what we're looking to do to try to save whales.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 45:08

That's a definite positive thing, and, scott and Tree, I'm sure you've got a lot that you want to ask too, because, michael, you are just filled with so much data and knowledge that you share with us each time, and did you guys have something that you wanted to add here?

Scott Mercer: 45:26

Kate Stafford was on a webinar last night talking about her bowhead research some of it and she mentioned that when the ice is out and around the Bering area that the noise will probably go up about 10 times over what it is now. But what I didn't understand was if she meant when the ice is out because that area would be ice free or it would be because of the ice not being there, or if the ice not being there because of shipping traffic. But I was wondering what you thought. You thought it was probably just talking about the shipping traffic. That was going to go up 10 times.

Michael Stocker: 46:04

Well, that's definitely going to happen if the Arctic is ice-free. People are going to go to the top. They're going to have to go through Panama Canal, so there's going to be a lot more shipping up there. Ice makes noise too. When it cracks and breaks up it's not really quiet. But this brings up another thing. We're talking about the starving gray whales. Gray whales feed on amphipods. They're mud feeders. They take in mud and they filter out all the various invertebrates in the mud and eat that. They used to call them mud whales because of that, and the amphipods and other invertebrates that are up in the Arctic area where they feed rely on this constant rain of phytoplankton that is coming down from the ice. As the ice retracts, that algae source of foods, the amphipods is going away, and so we're seeing a lot of starvation because the ice pack is disappearing.

Michael Stocker: 47:03

It's a shame and it's not really a lot we can do about it. They've seen some opportunistic feeding that these animals do where they're trying to get anchovies or krill or whatever out of the water column. But unlike the rorquals that have pleated gullets you know those big pleated, you know gullets, you know big pleated, you know gullets that they can fill with lots and lots of water and then squish the water out and the krill or anchovies or whatever is left behind.

Michael Stocker: 47:32

The gray whales don't have the pleated gullet, and so they may be able to feed, but what you know is the feeding effort going to pay off. Do they have enough? Energy that they can get from that, that they can basically do that kind of feeding. And there are people studying it right now, but it's not promising.

Theresa (Tree) Mercer: 47:57

The length of the gray whales. They're becoming shorter because they're not getting the caloric value for what they're feeding on. Now, with the decrease in the amphipods, they can adapt to maybe a different source of food, but it's not providing them with that same nutritional value, and they're considerably shorter than generations that came before.

Michael Stocker: 48:22

Yeah, the feeding effort is is challenging. So, yeah, it's going to be noisy up there, unless you start going through. I mean, what is the solution to this? There is an interesting propeller design. There's a company called Sherrow S-H-A-R-R-O-W and they have a propeller design that does not cavitate and consequently it's really quiet and it's appealing not just in terms of its noise, because I'm sure they'll be a lot more expensive than a standard propeller, because it's an elaborate casting, it's a lot of energy behind a cavitating bubble and they have to replace propellers on these large ships every five to seven years because the trailing edge gets all chewed up with this cavitation and it's expensive to change propeller.

Michael Stocker: 49:18

It costs millions and millions of dollars. You've got to take a ship and put it in a dry dock. You've got to pull this thing off. You've got to pull propeller. It costs millions and millions of dollars. You've got to take a ship and put it in a dry dock. You've got to pull this thing off. You've got to pull another one. If they had these non-cavitating propellers large enough to push these ships around, that would solve a huge problem.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 49:33

Wow, that's really interesting. It'll be good to follow up with that. That Shero, you said yeah, shero, bottom tra.

Scott Mercer: 49:39

Sharrow, you said the company.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 49:41

Yeah, Sharrow and bottom trawling and the noise that that generates and the impact that that has. I wanted you to touch on that. Anything else you'd like to talk about?

Michael Stocker: 49:50

Yeah Well, I mean bottom trawling. The noise is whether it's column trawling or bottom trawling. The boat's the big noise there, but the devastation to the habitat is unbelievable there. But the but the devastation to the habitat is unbelievable. I mean when I was a kid I used to fish with my family off between catalina island and los angeles. There was a area called the horseshoe kelp and it was a kelp bed that had been around since the ocean was a lot shallower when, during the ice age, you know, it was 100 meters shallower out there, the kelp started and it was like 600 feet deep. Currently it's 600 feet deep there. Every weekend we'd go out there. There'd be like 300 boats, people the recreational fishers you know enjoying it, catching bonita and yellowtail and rock cod and all kinds of critters that they were pulling up, and some jerk organization went through there and they drag trawled the entire horseshoe kelp oh, that hurts destroyed it, destroyed it completely.

Michael Stocker: 50:57

And because it was 600 feet deep, the kelp, it doesn't get any light down, they can, can't grow. You know it had. You know when it started, or was there during the ice age, there was enough light and then the kelp just grew up larger and larger, up towards the sun and they were able to photosynthesize. They were able to stay alive. That way, whole thing, and destroyed, destroyed an asset that thousands and thousands of people fed their family and enjoyed the holidays, enjoyed the weekends and whatever, and and and this guy was maybe getting 35 cents a pound for the fish he was pulling in and he was only, you know, processing the ones that he could sell. You know the stuff he didn't sell I, he just threw it overboard.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 51:42

It's like comparison of the value of a whale that gets harvested from the ocean instead of thinking about the value of their services over their lifetime and how much more valuable that is than a dead whale.

Michael Stocker: 51:59

In the end, all they were doing with the whale is just a blubber. The Japanese and the Norwegians and the Icelandics they eat the meat. But now the meat is so because of tropic concentration of heavy metals, it's toxic.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 52:15

I've been hearing about that too.

Michael Stocker: 52:16

Yeah.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 52:17

And Iceland. By the way, I hear whaling has stopped.

Michael Stocker: 52:21

They've stopped. Yeah, it's not cost effective. They were sending a lot of their whale meat to Japan and the Japanese were trying to. The whalers were trying to get the schools to put it in their venues so the kids would get habituated to it. But when the moms found out about the heavy metal stuff, they said, oh great, another mini Mata. Thank you, you know, we really appreciate your taking care of our kids here, so they weren't able to get that school thing going.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 52:53

So in these last couple of minutes, michael, what exactly would you like to convey to our audience again that we I know there's so much to cover, but what's really important on the top of your mind right now?

Michael Stocker: 53:06

Well, in terms of what we individually can do, there are two things. I tell people don't buy crap from China. The shipping I mean there are 106,000 boats that are insured by Lloyds of London and those boats are carrying I think 20 or 30% of it is fossil fuel and the rest of it is stuff that we buy that manufactured elsewhere. And if you saw the story of Stuff, it's an interesting animation movie that talks about what happens. How long does the stuff stick around? That stuff lasts about 18 days before you buy it in the store and in 18 days it's mostly thrown away. Most stuff is like that. So stop buying crap from China. We sell some swag, some t-shirts and things like that, but our stuff is manufactured on this continent, so we don't do the trans-oceanic shipping. That's the noise thing, and the other is use less energy.

Michael Stocker: 54:13

I'm headed off to Prague in a few hours. Actually, I'm taking off this afternoon. When I go to the airport there, I just go downstairs and grab a train. You know it's that easy. I was in Washington DC last April. I wanted to take a train from Washington DC to Pittsburgh and it's like a five and a half hour car drive and they were 11 and a half hour train rides.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 54:38

I remember you telling us about this.

Michael Stocker: 54:41

And they screwed up, and 36 hours after I took off from Washington DC, I was in Pittsburgh.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 54:48

No comparison.

Michael Stocker: 54:49

Yeah, Hopeless. We have a train here you can take from Larkspur Landing, where the ferry comes in from San Francisco, all the way up to the Santa Rosa airport and they're going to take it up further, I think, eventually. But people have been grousing about, you know, the fact that the ticket sales are not even covering 10% of what the cost of running the thing is. And somebody had done a chat GPT search on all the reasons why this was such a failure and the question he didn't ask was how can you justify running a train line and at the same time putting billions of dollars into widening the Petaluma Narrows for cars? People are going to take cars because it's easy.

Michael Stocker: 55:45

That's right, and they're spending billions and billions of dollars on that and nobody's grousing about that. If they decided to keep the Petaluma Narrows narrow, that train would be jam-packed.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 55:58

Right, that's right. Well, michael, thank you for bringing us up to speed on so many different topics. You guys cover so much, and we appreciate having you today here to talk with us well.

Michael Stocker: 56:13

Thanks, it's been an honor. I really enjoy you guys company and ocean conservation research. Our website is ocrorg, and then we have a blog site which is ocean-noisecom oh, okay, that's right.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 56:29

Great example of noises that are natural versus human generated yeah, that's on the.

Michael Stocker: 56:36

That's on the ocrorg. There's a sound library on that. That's a lot of fun. There's a lot of other activities on that. And then the ocean noise is the website of the blog site is. I have some like 650 short, 500 word essays on there. That's talks about this issue.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 56:52

Really. And you also have your educational series, the video series.

Michael Stocker: 56:56

Yeah, that is on on YouTube and I think Vimeo too. That's Daniela's department. It's on your website. Yeah, vimeo too, that's Daniella's department.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 57:03

It's on your website. They're YouTube videos, but they are linked there in one of the pages.

Michael Stocker: 57:11

You can find it there.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 57:12

So much information on your website.

Michael Stocker: 57:15

Yeah, I'm an information junkie.

Theresa (Tree) Mercer: 57:19

Yeah, yep, you are.

Michael Stocker: 57:25

It's wonderful. Safe travels, travels. Have a good trip, take care.

Theresa (Tree) Mercer: 57:27

Bye.

Leigh Anne Lindsey: 57:37

Thanks for listening to the Resilient Earth podcast, where we talk about critical issues and positive actions for our planet. Resilient Earth is produced by Planet Centric Media, a 501c3 nonprofit, and Seastorm Studios Inc, located on the rugged North Sonoma coast of Northern California. On the rugged North Sonoma coast of Northern California, I'm Leanne Lindsey, producer and host, along with co-hosts and co-producers Scott and Tree Mercer of Mindenoma, whale and Seal Study, located on the South Mendocino and North Sonoma coasts. The music for this podcast is by Eric Alleman, an international composer, pianist and writer living in the Sea Ranch. Discover more of his music animations, ballet, stage and Amazon Podcasts, iheartradio, youtube, soundcloud and wherever you find your podcasts. Please support us by subscribing or donating to our cause.