- Hi everyone the broadcast for today's webinar will start in just a minute here.
(clears throat)
and Hanna let me know if you need any help on that.
Are you still seeing a white screen?
- Yes, did I let me toggle I'll change the presenter and then give
it back to you and we'll start over
oh there it is, oh there it is, you're good.
- All right, well, welcome everyone to the National Marine Sanctuaries webinar series.
This series is hosted by NOAA's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries
and it's to connect formal and informal educators, as well as other interested
parties to provide you with the educational and scientific expertise as
well as the resources and training to support ocean and climate literacy
principles with your audiences.
So just a little bit of housekeeping before we get started.
All of the attendees will be in listen-only mode, but you're still able
to type out questions to the presenter into the question box that's located in
your control panel on the right side of your screen.
If you're having any technical issues, you can also
send those questions in there as well.
We'll be monitoring any of the incoming questions and any of the technical issues
and will respond to them as soon as possible.
This webinar is also going to be
recorded and any of the registered participants will receive a link to the
webinar archive page after the presentation has ended.
So this webinar series is also a great way to connect you with our National Marine Sanctuaries
so these are America's underwater treasures. They're the special ocean
places that are set aside by Congress to better understand and protect for future generations.
So, think national parks and national forests, but all underwater.
National Marine Sanctuaries encompass more than 600,000 square miles of marine
and Great Lakes waters, all the way from Washington State to Florida Keys
from Thunder Bay and Lake Huron all the way to the middle of the Pacific in
American Samoa.
There are 13 national marine sanctuaries and two marine national monuments
that help protect the ocean and Great Lakes.
So these are also significant areas for the marine environment with conservation, recreation,
ecology, history, culture, archaeology, and, of course, their aesthetic qualities, as well.
We also like to refer to our National Marine Sanctuaries as living classrooms
as they're places that you can see, touch, and learn about these special marine places.
So for the back end webinar support, I'm Hannah McDonald.
I'm the education specialist coming to you from the ocean oasis of
SIlver Spring, Maryland. And with me we have Claire Fackler.
She's the National Education liaison in Santa Barbara California.
She will be running the poll questions and
answering some of the questions you type in as well.
But most importantly, with us today, we have Dr. Lindsey Peavey Reeves.
She is a research specialist at Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary and
has been there since 2016.
She brings a diverse background
spanning in marine ecology conservation, cumulative impact
assessments and biogeography to the research team.
She received her Bachelors of Science from the University of Miami
in Marine Science. She received her Master's from
Duke and her PhD from UC Santa Barbara in environmental science
and management.
Lindsey worked on advancing dynamic ocean management at
the Southwest fishery science center as a California Sea Grant fellow, and with
NOAA she helps describe the multiple natural and anthropogenic pressures that
are on these marine ecosystems.
She collaborates with academics and stake holders
to produce and synthesize this information and informs management approaches.
So with that I'm gonna turn it over to Lindsay.
- Alright, can you hear me Okay?
Oh, here we go. That's great.
Alright, so you can hear me and see me Okay and
now you can see my, my screen?
- Everything looks great yeah you're ready to go see
- Perfect. All right well thank you so much for having me.
I'm going to kind of dive right in since we have a lot to cover here, but
I will answer questions along the way, or at the end.
So I'm gonna skip over the intro to the National Marine
Sanctuary since Hannah did such a good job here, and this is a visual of all of
those National marine sanctuaries and monuments that she spoke of and I have
the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary circled here. So you can see
where we are. And here's a close-up of our sanctuary and some some of our
statistics here on the right in case you're interested. It was designated in
1980. It encompasses five islands that are actually part of National Park Service so
we co manage some of the near shore water with the National Park.
We also work with this state you can see some of the red and the blue boxes there
are also state marine reserves and the Channel Islands National Marine
Sanctuary were some of the first places to establish these marine reserves on
the west coast. So we work with several jurisdictions to protect this area and
research as well.
All in all, the sanctuary is about 1,500 square miles.
So I'm going to talk today about soundscape monitoring, and I just kind of want to
get us on the same page here. We have a lot of multimedia in this presentation
so I'm hopefully that'll go pretty smoothly.
Here's our first audio I wanted to share with you.
(sounds of a busy city)
so I'm gonna pause it 'cause it is noisy and I don't know if you can hear me over it.
So this is probably a very familiar soundscape to most of you
it's it's a busy city and this is a heat map that was published by the National Park
Service in 2015 I think it's a great visual to show what a soundscape is.
And, here, the lighter colors are the loudest areas of the country and the blue areas
are the quiet or the quietest. And this is in decibel so you can see
the scale there to the right.
What you're seeing of course is probably
not that surprising since it's driven by the, you know, the lighter parts the
the louder parts are city centers and human population centers.
But, Is this where you want to do your first polling question?
- Yeah! Awesome, Thank You Lindsey we will go
ahead let's get the engagement going with everybody.
I've launched the first poll question for you to respond to.
"If you remove anthropogenic noise does this, quote/unquote, loudness pattern change?"
What do you think? Yes or no? go ahead and get your vote in
We've got about half of our attendees that have voted.
And for those of you that are online right now just so you
know we have 142 people directly participating.
Okay. Looks like we're pretty close.
I'll go ahead and close the poll and share the results
Looks like 91% of attendees believe that yes! Does the loudness pattern change if
you remove the anthropogenic noise? Excellent!
- yeah, I'm sorry
- not, not correct!
not not correct! that was a trick question.
yes, trick question. Yeah, that's why I think
this visual is is such a compelling one and it
it helps us understand what a soundscape is. So it's not just the anthropogenic or
human-made noises, but it's also geophysical noises like water flow and
wind going through vegetation,
as well as animals, of course, mammals and birds and
reptiles and things like that, in terrestrial systems.
And so, actually, when you remove the human-made noise
the map, the pattern looks the exact same in
the United States are very similar and that is because of mostly because of
water sources, which I think is really interesting.
So it's kind of illustrates
that sound scapes are a cumulation of all of the different sounds.
So it's the same thing underwater,
so we have these three types of sounds that make up the
soundscape: anthropogenic and you can seemany of those sources pictured here
geophysical, wave action, wind, rain, as well as biological like some of them
marine organisms you see here. And so all of these things make up a soundscape
underwater and similar to the perspective on land if you're standing
in one place a lot of these noise sources move over time and space, but
what adds a new challenge underwater is that they're very difficult to see and
to observe. And so it's critical that we use technology to be able to distinctly
measure these different parts of the soundscape. And so that's what I'm going
to be talking about today and showing some examples of how we are using some
technology to listen beneath the waves.
So why is it important to understand the soundscape underwater, in particular?
You know, as we talked about we are charged with managing and protecting and
researching these national marine protected areas. And there are special
places not only for humans but also for wildlife.
And so many of these animals rely on
sound to communicate, to socialize,
to navigate, to migrate, to forage.
These predator/prey interactions rely on being able to
communicate with sound, as well as growth, and reproduction finding mates.
And sad or light actually travels really poorly in seawater and
sound travels much, much faster and much farther
and so this is another poll question that we have for you.
- [Claire] Alright let's see what people know about how much faster sound
travels in water than an air.
So go ahead and make your guess.
- I only see that
- tricked again (laughing)
-I only see two two responses rather than four
- Oh, really?
-but that's Okay
- Okay I'm seeing all four options
- two, four point three, five point five or ten
- okay
- I think people are voting you got yep
- good
- alright looks like
we've got a little over seventy percent so we'll let folks
plug back in her and get their vote registered
okay let's go ahead. I'll close the poll.
Okay we have kind of a mishmash of answers here
the most people most people thought it was
five point five times faster
that was about 35%. We've got 34% that
think it's ten times faster
and then we've got 24% that feel it's 4.3 times faster
and I'll let you reveal our answer, Lindsey.
- yeah, the twenty four percent was correct
so it is 4.3 times faster so that's kind of a fun thing to
do in your spare time is look up how how sound travels in different media so
in sea water it is is 4.3 times faster than in air!
Okay, so this is kind of a busy graphic that
was published by National Geographic in 2011, but I do
think it's a good example. So, I want to kind of walk you through
a little bit, so within this cross-section of the the water column you see two right
whales one on the left side and one on the right side and they're attempting to
communicate with each other. This one on the left is sending out vocalization
hoping to reach the one on the right. And this shows you both in the the
cross-sectional visual and also these two these, two different graphs so the
one on the their very bottom right that shows frequency of various different
noise sources in the water column. So you have the right whale is highlighted in
yellow, the cargo-ship, lightning, air gun, submarine, wind, Cod, and rain this shows
that all of those different noise sources have different frequencies and
so they can interact and interfere in the water column, which is there's a
little blurb there says interference when the frequencies overlap.
And so there's interference that can impact the whales ability to communicate with
each other. And then this graph on the Left shows the intensity of these different
noise sources so you can see wind and rain has a lower decibel down here in
the blue side of this kind of thermometer moving up to submarine,
Cod, and then getting into right whale, cargo ship, and then at the top there is
air guns and lightning and so these things kind of go from disrupting the
the whales behavior to eventually being able to cause injury if it is too loud
and intense so I think this is a nice example of how just kind of visually
showing how the frequencies and the intensities overlap in time and space.
Okay, so I'm going jump into the Channel Islands and I'm
going to show you this visual here which
is also very busy, but that's on purpose
because our sanctuary is situated adjacent to some population center
so we have a lot of human traffic that is either accessing the islands, the
sanctuary, or passing by
And so here you can see several sources of anthropogenic
human uses which create sound
so you can see on the bottom left here we have a
menu that shows the the different symbols and color codes for all of these
different noise sources. There's some ports and harbors that are on the mainland.
These grey grey lines are that that go to the north and the south of
the islands are the shipping lanes, so this is one of the busiest shipping
lanes coming from coming to and from the busiest port of LA and Long Beach.
We also have some military testing so there's two zones that are colored here
for military testing. One is a little bit harder to see it's this
black dotted line that actually encompasses most of the of the sanctuary.
And then there's
some cross section orange here that is showing some important whale habitat
that overlaps with that testing area.
And so this is oh and then these red
triangles are oil platforms that we have offshore.
And so this is a good
illustration and it's not comprehensive. It doesn't show every single source of
human-made noise like you don't see recreation on here or fishing which also
produces noise but it does help to show some of them.
And so these circles that
are colored on these maps and you'll see the same map over and over again here
these are showing different areas where either the the sanctuary or our partners
have, have implemented listening
stations and so these are underwater microphones that we call higher
hydrophones that we have put there for various periods of time to record
different types of sound and so I'm gonna walk through a couple of these to
illustrate what we've learned so far and what we hope to learn in the future with
some of this research.
So, I'm gonna start with this yellow dot here which is on
the south side of Santa Cruz Island and it's in about 900 meters.
So this is a deep-water hydrophone and it's a noise reference station.
And I'm gonna show you here on the next slide
So this is actually part of a national network of
listening stations and so we are just one right there
noise reference station five of 12 that are around the nation.
And you'll notice a lot of them are co-located with national sanctuaries,
some with national parks,
and then other areas that are of interest within our exclusive economic zone.
On the left side here I want to draw your attention to a diagram of the
hydrophone mooring and so you see the different parts of how we station the
hydrophone which is just below the float, the yellow float, there.
How we stationed that on the sea floor:
so we have an anchor on the bottom, an acoustic release,
which helps us recover the gear when when it's time attached to the
hydrophone and then attached to a mid water float that keeps it upright in the
water column.
This national network we are just the Channel Islands National
Marine Sanctuary is one of many research partners that that work on this project
and mainly on the west coast we work with Pacific Marine Environmental
Laboratories which is also part of NOAA
as well as Oregon State University. And
so, I want to touch on some research that came from actually one of our
Nancy Foster scholars at Oregon State University. Samara Haver
She was able to compare five of the deepwater reference stations and so
Channel Islands was one of them.
So this is what she found to orient you
to this this graph here. As you can see five of the reference stations. So Alaska,
Olympic Coast, Channel Islands, Gulf of Mexico, and then the Northeast of the US
and so all of them have frequency on the x-axis, and then intensity in decibels on,
or the loudness, on the y-axis. And then all of the lines within each one of the
reference stations are different months across different years.
And so a couple takeaways from this work is that
there were two sanctuaries two deep-water
reference stations that stood out as being the most variable over time.
And that is Alaska and Gulf of Mexico so you can see on those two you which are the
that's far too left panels
all of the colored lines are farther apart from
each other which means they're some months and years where these noise
sources are are quieter than and louder in other months.
The Channel Islands, obviously, we're concerned with the most here
is we actually have pretty consistent or stable
loudness at this particular reference station over time
and so that that's important that we have a baseline of understanding what
this what we call ambient noise or background noises at these reference
stations so we can detect when there are changes over time.
- [Claire] Alright this is so I think oh no this is your second graph sorry to interrupt
yeah, well, that's Okay. that yeah, so T
This is also just kind of showing you
now the color codes are not different times of year they're that they're
they're the five different reference station and now we just have three
panels that show you three different months across two different years
So, we saw a frequency on the x-axis and intensity on the y-axis
and this just shows you comparatively which
which sanctuary is consistently quieter or
louder than the others. And so Channel Islands is here in this
kind of lime-green color and we are basically the second across these five
reference stations, the second quietest reference station where Alaska is
consistently quieter and you can see the Gulf of Mexico is the the noisiest and
unfortunately I don't have time to get into all of the details here about why
we see the differences across the months in each one of the sanctuaries and
across the reference stations and why we see the changes here across the the five
reference stations but this is something that I think would be interesting for
students to investigate further
Do you want to do the poll question Claire?
- yeah awesome thank you okay so our next poll question is
Why might ambient noise levels change in the future ?
because of an increase in ship traffic, an increase
in whale populations, a decrease in underwater military testing,
climate change, or for all the reasons above?
So go ahead and get your vote logged in
Alright we're just over 70% of you so give you another couple of seconds here
Alright, so the results, Lindsey, are that 75% of the participants
say all of the above!
So the other highest one was an increase in ship traffic just as a
standalone. But for the 75% of you, you are correct!
- Yeah excellent yeah all of the above and
several more reasons actually would be reasons why we would
see changes in this pattern
Okay so I'm going to jump to a different project
that hasn't been an op-- functioning as quite as long as the previous project
I mentioned began in 2014 so we've had several years to be able to analyze that data.
The project I'm going to talk about now is a shallow shallow water
soundscape monitoring project that we just started last year. And so we don't
have as much data to share with you today but I wanted to walk you through
the five different stations and kind of explain what we anticipate to find and
to hear and why we're interested in those locations.
So you'll see the last project I highlighted
we were able to compare and contrast across different
regions across different sanctuaries across different parts of the United States
waters and now we're just going to be focusing on comparing across
different sites within one sanctuary.
Here it's Channel Islands.
So, I'm going to start from from west to east out here
west of San Miguel Island there's a
little blue arrow there.
So I'm going to attempt to share this video with you
this is an area where it's not as well studied as a lot of the other parts of
the sanctuary because it's kind of a hard-to-reach location the weather can
be challenging, but we know from our partners that this is an important whale
hab-- whale foraging habitat. And so there's certain times of the year where
we think we will have a lot of whale activity and passive acoustic monitoring
like putting this hydrophone which you can
see here. There's, this is a picture of a hydrophone that's been deployed for
five months in a shallow water area which is why it has all that biofouling on it.
So if we are listening and that this location we expect that we'll hear
different marine mammal activity over time.
So, I'm going to share just a humpback whale spectrogram
Which is how we can kind of visualize.
You might want to turn up your own volume for this one this is a little quiet.
(Humpback Whale sounds)
okay so that was probably a pretty familiar sound for a lot of people who
are interested in marine life.
Let's go to the next location which is north of Santa Rosa Island
And so this is a shallow water location and because of
this we actually get a lot of small invertebrates but they make quite a bit
of noise and one of the animals that makes a lot of noise is a
Snapping Shrimp and so that's one of the species pictured here.
And I wanted to draw
take this opportunity to draw your attention to an online resource called
Discovery of Sound in the Sea.
And so this is a website that you can go to.
I'll show you here.
That has lots of different information about different
parts of the soundscape and also includes some of these sound files as well.
So this is what a Snapping Shrimp sounds like.
(Snapping Shrimp sounds)
and those are several Snapping Shrimp
kind of chorusing at the same time.
And these guys are surprisingly loud.
They can eat up a lot of data on our on our hydrophone
recorders. And so this is another one of our poll questions.
- [Claire] Alright.
I've launched the polls. So what do you think?
Why do you think Snapping Shrimp snap?
Are they doing it to communicate, to stun their prey, or to navigate, or to
communicate and stun their prey or communicate and navigate.
so go ahead and put in your best guess on why they snap.
Alight we've got into the 70% range of you that have voted.
Alright looks like we got the majority of you so I'll go ahead and close the poll.
Share the results. It looks like 40% feel that it's communicate and stun your prey so
A and B. There is a contingent that believes it's communicate and navigate, A and C.
and the correct answer is... is A and B!
so to communicate and to sum their prey so
you think the primary function of them using these really powerful and strong
claws to clamp down and make that kind of they call them kind of sound like a
gunshot or pistol under water and all of them at once can be very quite loud so
that is the primary function is to stun their prey.
Kind of startles them so that
they can kind of go in for the for the kill,
but also they communicate with each
other that way and other species
There's some researchers that are examining how
grey whales use sounds of snapping shrimp to help them migrate
up and down the west coast.
Okay so our next location is south of Santa Rosa Island.
This is a location among several others actually that we're interested in learning more
about how fisheries are using acoustic deterrents.
so this is a picture of a
fishing vessel they have a net out and you can see there's a zoom in here of
some sea lions that are caught in the net.
So, you know, sea lions are marine mammals.
They're highly intelligent and they are not opposed to getting a free meal.
So, when the fishermen are doing the hard work, getting the fish all corralled,
sea lions can kind of see that as a dinner bell.
And so rather than doing something lethal
to deter the sea lions and and other mammals,
fishermen are able to use non-lethal deterrence.
And this is just one example. Pingers are another example that's an
auditory, there's some chemical deterrents that they can use, but
we really don't understand how what the cumulative impacts of this.
Seemingly like an acute noise there's just a small explosion, this is like a little
firecracker that you can see fits in your hand. You can throw it, it sinks just
below the water surface and then explodes so that you think that would be an acute impact.
But actually if you're throwing several through the course of an entire
night if you're fishing for squid, for example, this can become a chronic and
definitely a cumulative impact on marine mammals.
So we're still learning more
about how this is affecting.
(acute noises)
so you can hear it's quite loud.
And like I said
there are several of these sometimes hundreds to thousands that are thrown in
one night of fishing in the in-- in extreme cases.
draw your attention to this website that shows that there is
some technical guidance that NOAA's
putting together the National Marine Fisheries Service.
They are trying to
provide some guidance to folks that use acoustic deterrents like fisheries to
try to take some of this new research into consideration for thresholds.
um..
So that's part of what where our data goes is we are able to provide them to
working groups that are working on more management applications.
Okay, our second to last location is
here east of Anacapa Island.
And so this is the only part of
the sanctuary you can see where the the shipping lanes intersect with the
sanctuary, and so we feel that this is likely going to be one of the loudest
parts of the sanctuary.
It's also heavily used area for
recreation and diving, so there's large boats, small boats, fishing vessels,
lots of human use in this part of the sanctuary.
And so here's an example of
this is where I will share another video
of what the ship noise sounds like.
And this is definitely more of a chronic...
- [Claire] Well, Lindsey, we do have some audio going on
right now so I don't know if there's something on your screen.
If it's not, we hear whales and some other stuff.
Oh... eww... huh!
interesting
I don't know why you hear whales.
Do you still hear it?
Yeah, we still do
(cargo ship noises)
-[Claire] Hannah, do you want to pipe in are you am I the only one hearing?
- [Hannah] yeah I don't hear whales either.
- Okay so hopefully you heard a cargo ship.
That was just kind of this low frequency
sort of sounds like background noise.
Sorry to interrupt you again, we're still hearing that other background noise
so, yeah I'm sorry to have to
- Claire, are you sure hat's not coming from your screen I am not hearing it as well
- [Claire] my gosh!
it is because I opened one of her links.
(laughing)
okay everyone thinks I'm crazy which I am a little crazy so I have both
Lindsay and I have colds so we're a little stuffy a little bit but yeah it's
on my end it's really loud so I'll stop it on my side.
okay, continue on, no, anyway, yeah
So you can see there's a great picture here that was taken by John Calambokidis
who's one of our west coasts researchers here for whales.
you know this is an area
this whole shipping lane is were concerned about ships interacting with
whales I'm and other marine life, as well.
Okay last, but not least, so we're here at Santa Barbara Island which is a pretty
remote part of our sanctuary so this is another area where we don't get to as
often as we like so it's really important for us to include this in our
shallow water soundscape monitoring network.
And this is a location where
we're actually combining a couple of different types of technology to monitor
a soundscape and they in a particular animal that we think is really reliant
on sound for movement and reproduction and foraging.
And so the hot pink dot
here is where we're going to be putting a hydrophone and then the yellow dots
are actually telemetry receivers.
And so we are tagging giant sea bass and
I'll show you a picture of what they look like in a second so you can get
an idea of the species of interest.
we are tagging
them with little acoustic tags that remain embedded in their muscle and
then we have these stationary acoustic receivers which this is a close up of.
So, the mooring looks very similar to our hydrophone mooring
And so we have this network,
and there actually be several more than just the orange dots shown
here of the the telemetry receiver
co-located with this hydrophone.
So here is if I want to share this video of how we tagged a giant sea bass.
This is a short one, but a really cool one. Maybe I'll play it twice.
The audio isn't so important on this one,
it's really the visual.
This one takes a second to load.
So this fish is an endangered and protected by California State
so we have a permit so to conduct this work
okay I think I might have been needed so you might not have heard me say that um
this is an endangered species which is another reason why we're very interested in
learning more about giant sea bass.
and so that's why we have a state permit
to complete the work which you saw the number there.
So in addition to just trying to track the movements of
tagged giant sea bass so we have four that we
have tagged at the sanctuary.
There's been our academic partners have tagged
more down at other islands like Catalina.
We'll be tagging more this throughout
this whole summer so we hope to get up to 25 animals, at least, that are tagged.
And they of course move between islands
and then sometimes they they actually don't move a lot.
So, that's one thing that we'll be analyzing is their
movements between locations around islands in between islands on both
inside and outside of the sanctuary but we're also interested in the
vocalizations that they that they make and they rely on.
So we've been trying to
record giant sea bass in two different ways we've been working with the
Aquarium of the Pacific to try to record some of their vocalizations in captivity
and then also doing in situ recordings so out at Santa Barbara Island.
With our hydrophones and also with drop cameras
So we can use our our divers as well to
drop cameras for ninety minutes or longer to try to use a baited arm
attract the giant sea bass and get some vocalizations that way.
And I think this our last poll.
Claire?
- [Claire] Yep, let's get that last poll question going.
So, hmm...
Giant sea bass can grow to over seven feet, and how many pounds? Take a stab.
300, 400, 500, 600 or 700 pounds?
What's your vote?
Okay well over half of you voted. I'll just give you all a few more seconds here.
Alright.
And go ahead and share our results.
So 33% of our attendees feel
that it could be about 500 pounds
and then the next two highest are the 400 or 600 pounds.
So break the news to them, Lindsey.
700 pounds! This is a very large fish!
So it can grow up to 7 feet and over 700 pounds
And so I mentioned that
this is an endangered species and the reason it's because
it's a it's a huge target for fisheries.
And so it was over-fished in the past and then the state of
California has instituted a lot of fishing regulations that have
seemed to be working. And we see and
what we appears to be an increase crease in the
population and so that's really
heartwarming and so we want to
we want to learn as much as we can about this species,
hopefully before a fishery were to reopen.
So while the species is still protected.
Okay, so the last thing I want to show you is
this is actually a hypothetical soundscape that I've created.
So, I've kind of shown you examples of things that we have been
listening to, things we have learned, things that we are currently listening to,
where we'll have data to share more in the future.
And so and a lot of these locations
we will...
um,
be hearing some pretty noisy soundscapes and
this is called an ambient mixer
And so I've put several of these sounds all in one
place,
too ,and this is what you were hearing I think, Claire, on your end.
- [Claire] It was indeed so I do apologize again
for that unexpected interrupts I'm like it's really loud how come no one's reacting?
this is a really cool resource and this
is open source you can I'll share the link with you at the end here.
But I've added all of these different channels to show that
all of these different sounds
overlap and space and time you know some of them are acute some of them are
chronic and cumulative over time it can be quite noisy. So,
we can kind of mute some of these one by one.
So now I've just got the Blue Whale going.
and the blue whale doesn't call all the time
Hopefully, you can hear that. Okay?
and then I can add in
(Dolphin noises)
some common dolphins
(cargo ship noises)
and then the cargo ship which is really loud so I'll keep that off for now.
(sea lion sounds)
(blue whale sounds)
an acoustic release sound which is actually a research instrument that makes quite a
bit of noise.
seal balms
(seal noises)
now the last one is rain so I just needed everything but the rain so you
can hear the rain.
as well
so like I said, this is a hypothetical but not far from
what we expect to hear at those specifically at those five shallow water
monitoring stations.
So of course the sound speed will vary we believe across
those five locations but that's an example of maybe an extreme soundscape
than you would hear.
So, I'm gonna stop there and take any questions.
I have up here, now, several education resources.
So, some of the things that I was able to
talk about in in this presentation
and then some things I didn't I wasn't able
to get to you but hopefully you can follow up on these individually and feel
free to contact me after this, as well,
if you have any questions.
- Yeah. Thank you so much.
Before starts the questions I just wanted to let everyone know that I'll
put this education resource list into a little one pager that will be available
for download download on the archive page so once we get your webinar
presentation recording up and other materials no need to stress trying to
write these things down
or they'll be available to you and then download.
so, Hannah, go ahead and take it away
- Yeah, so, Lindsey while you've been presenting
we've gotten some questions in our question feed and I encourage attendees
to continues to submit questions during the question and answer time.
anything we don't get to we will respond to with Lindsey's input in an email.
So, Madison has asked what our scientists still trying to learn about ecosystems and
sanctuaries?
- Oh, geez, that is a an open-ended question any group learn a
lot but I think maybe the take come of the two of the projects that I shared is
that we're really still at the point where we're trying to understand
baseline sound levels of individual distinct noises. Things like ship traffic
and also cumulative noise so
how all the geophysical, the biological, um and in the
anthropogenic noise interact over space and time.
so I would say, you know,
there's some really cool individual projects like the giant sea bass project
that I spoke, of there's lots of marine mammal projects that are acoustic
focused but really at the marine protected area level of sanctuaries as
we're still trying to get a good understanding of these baseline
soundscapes and sound environments and that really is going to help us be able
to detect changes over time and manage resources better.
- Great, Thank you!
Phyllis has asked: Does a slow traveling maritime or military large vessel make
louder sounds than the same vessel traveling faster?
Great question.
A faster ship is a louder ship.
So, some hooks might be familiar with
the problem of ships, actually, striking whales. So you know if a whale is in the path of a
ship it can strike the whale and so one of the ways we try to reduce that risk
is by slowing ships down. An added benefit of slowing ships down is to
reduce the noise from the ship and so
That's kind of a nice management
strategy that we've been pursuing for over a decade now, here, in such a heavily
trafficked area like adjacent to our sanctuary, as we're working with the
shipping industry and we've actually had pretty good success with getting
different shipping companies to slow their ships down. It's specifically when
they're transiting through and past the sanctuary and these important whale habitats.
So great question. A slower ship is a quieter ship.
-Great, thanks Lindsey.,
we are getting a few questions about seismic blasting, so I'll combine two of
them into one question. Mark is asking if NOAA Fisheries is still authorizing
seismic blasting despite the hazard to mammals? And then Dominique is asking is
there a routine for Navy sonar testing or seismic blasts in the sanctuary?
hmm
so there's I'll answer the second one first because that one's quick
we don't have seismic blasting that is initiated within the sanctuary so the
the military testing happens outside of the sanctuary.
But, as we hopefully learn
throughout the presentation you know sound can travel quite well in seawater,
and so just because that you know that sort of invisible boundary exists
doesn't mean that the sound can't travel inside the sanctuary. So there's still
of course a threat if there is military activity outside military testing
outside of the sanctuary that we could experience those impacts within the
sanctuary boundaries.
To address the first question, yes, the National Marine
Fisheries Service is still permitting folks like the Navy to conduct
activities like seismic testing.
There's actually a lot of kind of current events
about this particular issue on the East Coast right now
which I encourage all of you to follow.
Each population of marine mammals or any protected specie has has
a threshold levels for what we call it "take".
So, that's an injury or a death to
or harassment to a marine animal or protected species.
And so there's a certain number of those animals in each population that is allowable to to harm
or injure or what we call "take"
And so that is the the law that they are
operating under is allowing these takes and so yes they still are permitting and
of course there's a very long process of having to do environmental impact
assessments and to try to to the best of their ability to predict how many
animals within each population, within each region, that they will affect and so
that's how they work together to to coexist in those .
- Great, thank you.
Another few questions I'm gonna try to combine here. We're getting quite a few in,
so if we don't get to all of them we'll be sure to ask Lindsey and email you the answers.
But, Christopher is asking if you could please talk a little
bit more about how marine mammals use sound as navigational cues?
And then Alissa is also asking how sounds can be used to better understand and protect
marine sanctuaries? So, if you want to try to connect those two questions there
that'd be awesome.
- Yeah. What was the second one?
How sounds can be used to better understand and protect national marine sanctuaries. okay so marine mammals use sound in
Several ways so they can talk to each other
and they can use other cues
auditory cues I gave this snapping trip as an example as ways to navigate and so
depending on baleen whales and and melon-headed whales are have two
different ways that they use sound but basically it's good to think about it as
a call-and-response. They send out a vocalization and when they get a
basically echo of that vocalization, they can, it helps them navigate whether
they're in a big ocean basin or if they're in a shallow area or if they're
close to a kelp bed or close to the shore.
So those are some of the ways that
they use vocalizations to navigate and to migrate.
and how we how we use sound
to study marine protected areas I think was the second question
I've given a lot examples today but I think comparing those sounds so some of
the locations that I shared with you and Channel Islands were interested in
better understanding how resources like marine mammals are using the habitats.
And so, that's a consistent theme across a lot of these marine protected areas
sanctuaries in particular. And so, I think that's kind of this common thread that
we have marine mammals, shipping is another one of those sound sources that
occurs across many of them, the National marine sanctuaries, as well as fisheries.
So, going back to the beginning Hannah's introduction of marine sanctuaries is
you know these are special places that we want to encourage activity we don't
prevent any activity, except for oil and gas exploration.
so all other activities are encouraged in a sustainable way.
And so, these common threads across
these common uses across national marine sanctuaries are a nice way to think
about how we're approaching researching sound.
- that's great. thank you.
And we've received a few questions on how to best relay this information to the public in
just a few key points. And so, I think this would be a great final question to wrap
up your presentation? It's just if you were to convey it to someone from the
public and a few points how would you convey it and
what would you tell them they could do to help?
hmm.. Okay.
Well, I think, you know, just kind of
understanding sound in the ocean is something that is still tricky for the
general public, and so, hopefully this idea of a soundscape. I think a lot of
times we think about the anthropogenic noises being the loudest and the most
disruptive noises in the ocean and and in fact that's not always the case.
Kind of going back to that National Park example, which is a stressed example, but
similar in that a nice kind of point that you could a teaching point that you
could share with the general public is that things like earthquakes, lightning,
these these very natural processes, Snapping Shrimp are very loud.
So, it's not that we need a quiet ocean, we just need to preserve the
interactions between habitats and species that are natural.
So, those are maybe the two points that I think would be interesting to convey to the public
is understanding what a soundscape is, all of the different components of the
soundscape, and why it matters. You know, we don't necessarily need a super quiet
ocean we just need to preserve the natural interactions between
the habitats and the species within ecosystems.
- Great, thank you so much.
And, Lindsey, thank you so much for the incredible and informative presentation
on ocean soundscapes. I've sure learned a lot and I really appreciate all of the
education resources that you've shared at the end, as well.
So I'm excited to share those with all of the attendees.
I wanted to thank you all for attending
the National Marine Sanctuaries webinar series today, and we welcome any feedback
that you might have or further questions to the email that's up on this slide or
Claire or my own email that was on the slide with our information as well.
we're also going to answer the submitted questions that we didn't get to during
the question and answer time. So stay tuned for those we'll send out an email
to Lindsey with those questions and once we get her response we'll share them with you as well.
And well as a reminder we're also going to share this recording
of the webinar on the archive that's the archive link that's shown above and
we'll send that out to the registrants as well.
There's also a evaluation that
is only going to ask you a few questions and take about three minutes at the end
of this webinar, so if you would be able to complete that right after signing off
that would be fantastic and we'd greatly appreciate any feedback you're willing to share.
Additionally you will receive a certificate of attendance for one hour
of professional development after completing this webinar, so we'll send
that out after today's presentation.
And our National Marine Sanctuaries webinar series will continue
so our next webinar will be May 21st.
and it will be on estimating coral feeding habits from space
so definitely one that you're going to want to check out from Dr. Michael Fox
We also have another one coming up in June
June 11th that's about protecting blue whales from
vessels vessels ship strikes with vessel speed reduction.
This kind of goes along with Lindsey the vessel sound and and vessel speed noise
and like I said, again, I'd like to encourage you to complete the evaluation following this
presentation. And we'll be in touch with the education resources, the certificate,
and answering any follow-up questions that you may have.
Thank you again, Dr. Lindsey, for the great information and for the information on
the impact that noise has on the ocean.
Alright thank you so much for your time this concludes today's webinar!
- Great, thank you.