[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart. It's officially summer, and maybe listeners you've been able to get in some swimming. You know that when you're at a crowded pool or a busy beach, that you can take a break from some of that noise by submerging your ears under the water. Just because all that terrestrial noise goes away, it doesn't mean that things are quiet underwater.

In fact, because of how sound moves through water, there's actually more noise down there where vibrations can travel farther and faster than the air. Those sounds are alien to us. We don't intuitively know how to make sense of them like we do with sound on land. You know who does know how to make sense of underwater sounds? It's underwater creatures.

There's a new book called Sing Like A Fish: How Sound Rules Life Underwater, and it explores the sonic world of the oceans from coral that can "hear" without ears, and hear is in quotation marks there. They can hear without ears to the ways that beluga whales communicate something we might recognize as identity, to the global growl underwater caused by the shipping industry, and how it's impacting ecosystems that rely heavily on the information that that sound carries.

Joining me now is the author of the book Amorina Kingdon. Amorina, welcome to All Of It.

Amorina Kingdon: Thank you so much.

Kousha Navidar: It's wonderful to have you here. This book, I love the title, Sing Like A Fish. You write about how as a child you noticed how sound works differently underwater, even if you didn't yet understand the science to explain it. For folks who haven't submerged in a while, can you remind us what it sounds like?

Amorina Kingdon: Yes. I think a lot of people have this experience. For me, it was when I was swimming with my brother and we were trying to play underwater, and sound seems really muffled. Voices in particular really don't work. I think a lot of kids will stick their heads underwater and try to scream at each other, yell at each other. They'll realize like my brother and I did, that sound, you can't hear each other, so you just start yelling bad words, of course.

[laughter]

Amorina Kingdon: Or if you jump in a swimming pool, or even sometimes if you're having a bath and you dunk your head and you just get this sense that sound doesn't really work down there. Like I said in the book or like I realized, where you can't perceive something, it's really hard for humans to imagine that it exists. I think a lot of us just don't really think about it.

Then the wonderful Captain Jacques Cousteau back in the 1950s of course did a very famous movie called The Silent World, and this trope of the ocean and the sea as being quiet and silent just stuck. It's only in the last couple decades that we've really started to listen to and untangle. There were people who were pioneers beforehand that were looking and listening underwater, but it's only in the last little while that we've really started to bring it into the mainstream of science.

Kousha Navidar: Yes. Now as an adult, what did you learn about this subject that made you say, "Hey, there's a book here"?

Amorina Kingdon: [laughs] I was a staff writer for a magazine here in Victoria in British Columbia called Hakai Magazine, and they do coastal science. Right away, Victoria British Columbia is situated in a really interesting little waterway. It's called the Salish Sea and we have the ports of Seattle, Vancouver, and Victoria all in one very small space. We also have a cruise ship port, we have two military bases, and we also have an endangered population of very beloved killer whales. There's just a lot of sound science going on. There's a lot of discussion of animals underwater and how humans make sound underwater.

I was working for Hakai Magazine, and I was starting to find more and more stories where there was mention of humans having an impact or somehow interfering with animals' sound underwater. Whenever I heard this, I would just have this intuitive blip in my mind. I just wouldn't quite be able to picture it. I think of something like an oil spill or a ship strike and I can see it. It makes sense to me when someone describes that as a problem. I'm like, "Oh yes, that makes sense."

When I would hear about sound being a problem for animals, I would just think, "I just didn't quite get it." Then I started to get more and more stories about how sound can interfere with the interactions that animals have, and the more that I understood those interactions and how critical they were. Sound can change cleaner wrasse fish and the rate at which they try to clean their client fish. Sound can interact with or impact mother whales murmuring quietly to their babies to keep them close. Because whales don't have arms, they can't hold their babies, so they keep in touch with little sounds, and when that's interrupted they can get separated.

The more I learned, the more I learned. The more I learned there's a fish in this part of the world called the plainfin midshipman, and it is a very loud fish. Every spring, it will come up on the shore, not on the shore, but like right at the shore, and it will hum for a mate. If you listen to it, you can actually hear it with a hydrophone sometimes even above the water. I was lucky enough to hear these fish a few years ago and I was just hooked. I was like, "Okay, I have to learn everything about how this sound works, about how these fish are making it," and so I just took off.

Kousha Navidar: Let's talk about those creatures for a second because water, the ecosystem is so much different than air. Everything interacts, basically almost everything interacts in the water differently than it does on air. Water carries smell, chemicals differently than the air. It just feels different to be submerged in. For these creatures living down there, what sensory techniques has underwater life evolved to make sense of that very different environment?

Amorina Kingdon: [laughs] Life did evolve in the water. Our ears evolved in the water, our eyes evolved in the water. It's land that's the weird one if you think about it. [laughs]

Kousha Navidar: Fair point, fair point. Yes.

Amorina Kingdon: Not the weird one, but--

Kousha Navidar: The sequel. [laughs]

Amorina Kingdon: Yes. The sequel, exactly. Yes, our ears evolved adaptations to be able to hear in air, but the first ears were actually evolved by fish in the water. Fish do in fact have ears. Basically in water, water is a lot denser than air. If you're a physicist or an acoustician, or gosh forbid, a fish evolutionary biologist, I'm just apologizing in advance for how much oversimplification. Basically, because water is denser, sound moves through it a little bit easier, and it goes about four and a half times faster and it goes a lot further. At the same time, light gets absorbed a lot quicker.

Even in the clearest ocean water below about a couple hundred meters, there's really not any light to speak of, and then in coastal waters it's usually murky. Scent does actually diffuse through water pretty well and a lot of animals do use it. The further you go, the more distance you get, the less useful it is. It diffuses slower through water. If you're looking at information underwater and you want to know what's going on around you, sound is actually one of the best, if not the best information channel to tap into. It's disadvantageous if you don't tap in.

It's not only that ears and sound works really well underwater, it's that there's just a little bit less information in other distant senses for anything to grab in the first place, if that makes sense.

Kousha Navidar: Yes, absolutely. Listeners, we're talking about the book Sing Like A Fish: How Sound Rules Life Underwater. We're here with the author Amorina Kingdon. I understand you've recorded some of a sound that I'd like to play. I know you've brought us a piece of tape from Cape Cod, that sounds like cusk-eels and toadfish, what sounds they make. Tell us what we're about to hear.

Amorina Kingdon: Okay. I embarked on a quest to actually listen to fish. I got myself a little dip hydrophone, which is essentially like a cord with a little microphone on the end that can hear sound underwater. I set out wherever I went reporting, wherever I went, I would put the hydrophone in the water and just see what I could hear. I could not, for the life of me listen to fish. They're difficult to hear sometimes.

A lot of the time they have to be in the right season, you have to be in the right cove or the right bay, or they can be tricky. I was on Cape Cod and this was a bright, sunny day. There was probably like 30, 40 boats in a really narrow waterway. There was kids with ice cream and parents, and sun and everybody was having a fantastic time. You would believe it if you saw JFK over there.

Kousha Navidar: [laughs]

Amorina Kingdon: It was just very fancy Cape Cod, amazing summer day, right? I rented a paddleboard on the Bass River in West Dennis, or near West Dennis, and I was just basically drifting down this waterway with a hydrophone, very precariously. Now that I'm thinking about it, I really should have been safer. Basically there's boats passing me, and then I put the hydrophone in the water. Because it was spring and these are coastal estuary waterways, there's all these fish in the water that are trying to find each other to mate.

One of the things about fish is that they use sound to mate for a very, very good reason. I apologize in advance if this is a little bit TMI, but like when fish mate, they have to release their gametes together simultaneously, because if it's in the water and you need them to mix, you need to do it pretty much at the same time. A lot of fish will use sound to either find each other or coordinate their mating dance. They don't really have a choice because sound is the only way to find each other.

I'm listening to these fish that are trying to mate underwater while I am drifting down the Bass River. Above it is like summer Americana wonderfulness, and then below the water is fish trying to find each other. [laughs]

Kousha Navidar: I just want to point out, we are not talking about the birds and the bees. We were talking about cusk-eels and toadfish, which is wonderful. That's a new take on a wonderful subject. You broke it on WNYC. Okay. That's what we're listening to. Let's listen to it right now. Here it is.

[toadfish sounds]

Amorina Kingdon: Yes. [unintelligible 00:11:04]

Kousha Navidar: What were you about to say as we bring that down? Go ahead.

Amorina Kingdon: Just how quiet it is underwater, considering that above the water was crazy. That toadfish is just calling for a mate, and that's just a boop, boop, boop trying to find its mate.

Kousha Navidar: That's the bubbling sound, is the toadfish.

Amorina Kingdon: Yes. [laughter]

Kousha Navidar: Let's listen to it again. Here it is.

[toadfish sounds]

Kousha Navidar: That's the toadfish right there?

Amorina Kingdon: Yes. That little sound.

Kousha Navidar: Oh wow.

Amorina Kingdon: Yes. He's calling for a mate. I think that clip actually, I'm not sure if you can skip ahead to about 45 seconds, but there's a cusk-eel in there as well.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, we have it just ending here, but maybe we can pull it up later for 45 seconds later on it. If you listen closely, I bet you can hear it saying, "Hey baby. Hey baby. Hey." [laughs]

Amorina Kingdon: If you think about it, if you're a fish, in the water, it's very murky. It was sandy water. I put my hand in but I couldn't see my hand below the surface. A lot of coastal waters are murky. If you're trying to find a mate to perpetuate whatever, your fish genes, then yes, you're going to have to find them with sound because you're not going to see them, and you're not going to touch them unless you're very, very lucky, and you're probably not going to taste them. As for scent, that does work on a lower, smaller time or smaller space scale.

Kousha Navidar: You have a chapter in the book that's called, This is me: how sounds define identity. What do you mean by identity when it comes to these undersea creatures? Is that about how humans understand what's being communicated, or do these creatures really have an innate sense of like me and you when it comes to being an individual among many?

Amorina Kingdon: That is a really good question. The short answer is we are just starting to think we might understand. [laughs] That chapter is very specifically looking at what we know of research in marine mammals. Mammals are an interesting case. They've got a lot of attention underwater because we know a lot about their sounds. What we're really learning cutting edge right now is how those sounds, what they actually refer to and what they mean, and how they mediate their interactions.

Mammals by definition will have some social bonds. The very basic one is between mother and child, mother and calf. When you're talking about defining identity for whales, what we seem to find a lot is that whales will define their group identity. For the southern resident killer whales here where I live, they have different order. They're matriarchal, so they live in groups that are defined by their mothers, their grandmothers. They'll stay with the same group their life, and they will define their groups. They will have groups of what are called pulsed calls that are unique to that group.

That's how they know what, for lack of a better word, family they're from, from what clan they're from. We find this in killer whales. They will have unique pulsed calls that they will have just for that group. Sperm whales even that make very, very loud clicks, will have codas of clicks that define their matrilineal groups. Belugas have contact calls that we're just starting to look at research that suggests that they are defining different groups in those contact calls. Dolphins quite famously have signature whistles. What that basically means is each dolphin develops a signature whistle that's unique to that animal and that's its "name".

To answer your question about their understanding of identity, a lot of what we're finding about these groups are to do with groups. With dolphins, what we found is there actually seems to be an understanding of the individual, and they actually seem to have the ability to label each other with their unique whistles. Not only could I say, "I'm Amy, I'm Amy, I'm Amy," but I could also say, "You're Joe, you're John." I can call another dolphin its name. That if you think about it is a pretty huge leap to be able to appreciate another dolphin's individuality too.

Kousha Navidar: We got to take a quick break. We're talking about the book Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Underwater. Stay with us. We'll be right back.

[music]

Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar. We're talking with Amorina Kingdon, the science writer and the author behind the book Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Underwater. We were just talking before the break about this concept of identity. I think there's also this other concept of culture that you talk about in the book that I found really interesting. You describe certain elements of undersea communication. You also describe how humpback whale songs contain in equivalent of rhyming, for example.

Where else do we see things that might be read as culture among undersea creatures, and what do we understand about why it exists?

Amorina Kingdon: Well, culture is one of those words where when I set out to write this book, I thought, "Oh, I'll just find the dictionary definition of culture, and then I'll put it in the book and then that will be that. Then I'll just figure out how all that works." As any student of cultural studies would tell you, there is a lot of different definitions of culture.

There's actually a debate among scientists what that even means. Some people will say, "Of course, animals don't have culture. You need cathedrals or whatever to have culture." Then other people will say, "Well, of course, animals have culture." I'd like to give credit to a book by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell called The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins, which I think dove into this really beautifully. If you ever get a chance to pick it up, I think you should. It just defines culture as very simply the way we do things. It's how a certain group does things that's different from another group doing things.

What we find is that marine mammals will have certain ways of doing things. To go back to the killer whales, here in Victoria, there's different groups of killer whales that all live in the same area. Some of them are called the resident killer whales and they exclusively hunt Chinook fish. They hunt salmon and that's it. Then there's transient killer whales that are marine mammal eaters, and they will hunt seals. They live in the same area.

To the untrained eye, they're the same animal, and yet they have completely different hunting. They have completely different family groups, they have completely different sounds. They have completely different ways of being a whale. A lot of scientists will say that's two different cultures. I should also just say, we're just beginning to understand what these animals may understand about what they're doing. We're putting these human labels on them. We're looking at that and saying, "Oh, we think this is culture, or we think this is same with words like song and language."

A lot of the time, we're using these words because we don't really have any other words for what we're seeing and what we're looking at. It could very well be that the animal's understanding of this is completely different from ours. Yes, I like the definition of culture. That's the way we do things. What we find is that underwater animals seem to define their ways of doing things sonically a lot of the time, especially when it comes to marine mammals.

Kousha Navidar: Your last two chapters take a close look at human sounds and how they impact the marine soundscape, and what you call the "global growl" caused by the shipping industry. How does that global growl, or how might it impact the sensory experiences of an individual creature? Can you translate that to the impact on the ecosystem?

Amorina Kingdon: Yes. Well, the global growl is definitely right because shipping noise permeates pretty much every corner of the ocean. It's been recorded at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. That's just because we ship a lot of stuff. Shipping lanes are around the world and they operate 24/7. Shipping noise, if you're right near a ship it could be very, very harmful just in terms of hurting your actual ears, or hurting your sensory hear cells depending on what animal you are.

When you're talking about shipping, you're often talking about more of a reduction in what scientists consider to be things like communication space or listening space. For example, if you are a whale that relies on sound to keep in touch with your family, a shipping lane can reduce the space over which you can keep in touch with your family. Rather than hearing them over 10 kilometers, you can only hear them over 3 kilometers. The same goes for an animal that's listening out for predators.

If you're listening for the sounds of whales or seals that might be trying to eat you, you can hear it for a shorter distance if there's shipping noise in the area. The other thing that can happen when you have chronic noise, as anybody who's lived near a highway can probably tell you, this is true above the water too. We're just starting to understand how chronic noise can affect human health too. We're asking questions about what it means for animals is really relevant I think right now.

Kousha Navidar: To anyone who lives in New York City, in fact.

Amorina Kingdon: Oh, my gosh. Yes. Well, I live beside an ambulance route and I'm sure that that's taken a little bit of time off. Anyways, but yes, the other thing that tends to happen is you have to call louder and more often sometimes in order to get your message across. Not to get too esoteric, but there's the whole science of communication and signal design and that sort of thing, which is really fascinating. If you want to send a signal a long way, for instance, it's best if it's lower, and it's very simple, and it can be repeated. There's all these sorts of things that you can learn about animal signal design.

If you're an animal that's making complex signals that need to be understood at the other end, like the way that we know a lot of marine mammals do, and you have a shipping lane or something like that, that's going to mean that you have to maybe put more effort into calling more often or calling louder. It's going to change your calling behavior. We don't know what that means for an animal. It might eat into your hunting time if you have to spend time running away from ships or naval sonar or something. Animals don't have fridges. They don't have storage. If you want to eat today, you have to hunt today. That's a big thing, too.

Kousha Navidar: If you're thinking about because we're talking about the impact on the ecosystem, this systemic impact. What avenues of study does sound open up for scientists who are trying to fill in those gaps in our knowledge that you're describing?

Amorina Kingdon: That's actually really exciting. I found a lot of good reason for optimism in this actually thank goodness, which was I was happy. What I found is that a lot of people who are not acousticians, who are not sound scientists are actually incorporating sound just into their studies of ecosystems, which is really cool. Here in British Columbia, there's people that are studying kelp forests and kelp forest ecology. They're starting to look at how kelp forests can absorb and dampen noise for the animals that live inside them. Coral reef scientists are looking at the study of how sound moves through coral reefs.

Basically, people are starting to include sound as a aspect of the ecosystem that they hadn't looked at before, which is really amazing. Because that means it brings an even deeper understanding of how sound works with everything else to make an animal's life the way that it is, which is great. Something else that's really interesting too is that in many cases, it's easier and quicker to monitor the sounds of an ecosystem than it is to go out and do a lot of expensive and complicated in-person monitoring.

Kousha Navidar: How interesting.

Amorina Kingdon: Now, that's not to say that it's like a-- It doesn't solve everything. There's some things that you can tell from a sound that you really need somebody to be there and monitoring. For example, you can tell that a certain species is there, but you can't count how many of that species are there.

If you're in a situation where you have limited resources, and you need to monitor, say, this marine protected area, or you want to monitor this wind farm construction site or something, and you don't have the time or the manpower to have an extensive monitoring situation going on, you can record the sounds and monitor the sounds of the ecosystem and learn a remarkable amount from it.

I think there's a lot of applications of sound underwater now that we know how central it is and how critical it is, where it can help us understand additional aspects of an ecosystem that maybe we just didn't understand before. It can also give us some insight into how we can keep tabs on ecosystems that maybe we never could before, which is fascinating.

The last thing I'll say about that is that there are parts of the ocean that we are just starting to poke our nose into, for better or for worse. There's the Arctic. As we all know, climate change is accelerating and sea ice is retreating. There's every reason to believe the industry is going to be increasing in the Arctic waters, unfortunately, or fortunately. Understanding the soundscapes of the Arctic Ocean before we intrude there is something that I think is absolutely critical. Another area that we're just starting to look at is the deep sea, and prospecting for deep sea metals in the Pacific and around the world.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, wow. It's wonderful to see it.

Amorina Kingdon: Using sound as a tool of inquiry here is really useful.

Kousha Navidar: Wow. There's so many interesting applications there. The book is Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water. We've been here with Amorina Kingdon, who is a science writer and the author. Thanks so much for this work.

Amorina Kingdon: Thank you so much, Kousha. It was great to chat with you.

 

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