Field report from Berlin

Alexander von Humboldt stepping onto a scooter in Berlin

Every three years there is a gathering of folks involved in marine bioacoustics who confer, share notes, present our work, and cultivate relationships with others in the field. The conference is appropriately called “Aquatic Noise.”

I missed the first one in Nyborg, Denmark because I was just getting OCR up on in the tracks at the time, but I have attended subsequent meetings in Cork, Ireland, Budapest, Hungary, Dublin, Ireland, and Den Haag, Netherlands.

The idea was concocted by Art Popper, and Tony Hawkins – both fabulous and deep marine bioacousticians whose careers have been academically focused on fishes, but who also had the wisdom to know that gathering all stakeholders together with intersecting interests in Aquatic Noise would do much to advance the field.

So unlike most scientific/academic conferences, this one is not just academics presenting a litany of research papers, rather it pulls together a cornucopia of marine biologists, governmental regulators, mathematicians, policy managers, physicists, and even a few folks like me from the environmental Non-Governmental Organization (eNGO) community.

Art and Tony both have a healthy curiosity uncommon in the halls of Academe – and have pulled together what formed the philosophical fabric of Aquatic Noise. But I suspect it was their wives – Helen and Sue (respectively) who informed the pattern of that fabric.

The seminal idea was to gather people together in an interesting, family-friendly, and inexpensive location; structuring a conference wherein participants could meet others in our field, and provide the time and opportunities for us to comfortably “break bread” and cross-pollinate. “Convivial” is a word that comes to mind.

While we are all given an opportunity to present our work – either in oral presentations or posters, the conveners always invite key-note speakers whose work is outside of, but tangential to aquatic noise, running the possibility of disrupting the orthodoxies of our aquatic noise inquiry.

This year we had a few of them. On Tuesday it was Dr. Wei Qiu presenting on “Kurtosis.” This is a term I have been flogging for years as a way to have regulatory noise exposure metrics more accurately reflect biological impacts.

The current noise exposure metrics only express sound quantity, so a loud orchestra has the same “damage value” as a loud sheet-metal grinder. Kurtosis brings in a way to express the sound quality difference between the two.

On Thursday Louise Roberts, gave a presentation on “bio-tremology” – the way that various animals communicate by way of substrate vibration. It turns out that a lot of animals use this communication channel – with elephants and frogs communicating through the ground, insects communicating through the branches and leaves of plants they inhabit, and grubs and worms communicating through the soil.

I examine this to some extent in my book, but Dr. Roberts really opened up my ears to the breadth of vibration-borne communication; expanding on her work may have profound consequences on how we consider the “bio-vibroscape” of the benthic inhabitants – the  annelid and sabellid worms, shrimp, amphipods and copepods, clams and other mollusks; the panoply of which forms the foundation of the marine trophic pyramid inhabiting the muddy sea floor.

It turns out that few of these are silent, but instead of communicating through water, they communicate through the mud – and the “vibroscape” is every bit as detailed as the soundscapes we hear in air – with chorusing, partitioning (not interrupting), and inter-species call-and-response exchanges.

I will “drill down” into both of these topics in upcoming newsletters; suffice it to say that introducing the diverse and intelligent participants of Aquatic Noise to these subjects will undoubtedly advance the field in remarkable ways.

I am looking forward to “AN2025” when we’ll be able to share the harvest of the ideas, exchanges, relationships, we had last week at AN2022.