South Pacific Coral Reef
(Click for soundscape recording by Julius JB Piercy)
There are a number of encouraging trends in the world of marine bioacoustics. These are being driven by a number of factors: flexible ways of synthesizing gobs of data, cross-pollination between physics and biology, and an ever-expanding “systems understanding” of living environments. These factors facilitate a phenomenological approach to assessing animals in their habitats, and incorporating environmental data that in earlier times was considered ‘noise.’
This trend was well woven into the fabric of the Aquatic Noise conference in Berlin last month, evidenced by the common use of the term “soundscape.” This is a term that has been found in the fields of urban design and architectural acoustics for decades – largely because, if the soundscape isn’t right, humans can complain about it, or if it is right, they can wax poetic about it. It becomes a matter of discussion. Critters are not so blessed, and should humans “project” on an animal’s experience, it falls into the philosophical pit of “anthropomorphizing.”
But scientists are finding that animals – even simple organisms, “express emotions,” deliberate, and construct inter-species economies of value. And we are also finding that what once was considered “an individual organism” may be more of a community.
Sea corals come to mind. As an organism, corals can live untold – like hundreds of years (at least). But as a community, a coral is more like a town – a structural arbor housing a collection of cnardians “looking out after their mutual benefit.”
So where do the boundaries exist in these systems? Last week James Lovelock passed on to the Spirit World. When, in the 1960s, he was asked by NASA to determine if there was life on Mars, the polymath chemist realized that living systems express their life in cycles – breathing being one of the more obvious; and that if a planet was inhabited, it too would breathe. He named this idea “The Gaia Hypothesis” – that an inhabited planet was a living thing.
While the hypothesis was readily embraced by environmentalists, some of the mechanistic Darwinists had a hard time accepting that animal behavior could be driven by any factors outside of “instinct,” amplified by the individual incentives of any particular organism.
But as the preponderance of data – and the ability synthesize it all, weighs in, the trend is to accept the empirically obvious – even while the gathered data (covariates) were not included in the original hypothesis.
An important step along the way was the inclusion of “expert elicitation” into the canon of “verifiable data.” This is where – for example, the perspectives of an Inuit subsistence whaler who embodies generations of whaling knowledge, could be included in the lexicon of “verifiable data” predicated on his accounts of generations of experience.
So generations of whaling experience fall into the same toolbox with the flexible ways of synthesize gobs of data in consideration of how the physical characteristics play into the perception and needs of inhabitants of a particular environment, and how these perspectives fill out our understanding of any particular species we might be studying.
Listening to, and evaluating soundscapes, is a great way to understand the habitat from which it comes. A biologically healthy soundscape is like a well-tuned orchestra; acoustical niches are inhabited across the entire auditory band of its inhabitants. The challenge is to find ways of qualifying and quantifying this in understandable terms.
