Reflections on Berlin II – Keynotes and themes

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Aquatic Noise 2022

One of the intentions of the triennial Aquatic Noise conference is to bring together a broad swath of stakeholders, exposing us all to a common presentation agenda. While there are often workshops before the conference which take advantage of a gathering of specialists who are all in the same town at the same time, the rest of the conference runs a single track – planned by the conveners, to cover various topics of the field in a manner that would inform scientists, industry, the military, and regulators alike.

This is really helpful, because when we need to communicate our concerns to industry, or the Navy (for example), they may have their ocean noise “Subject Matter Experts” on staff, but they largely know the topic through the lenses of their own particular institutions.

Each day opens with a keynote address. Day one this year was a presentation by Christine Köppl on the evolution of vertebrate hearing – and how jaws, cilia, bladders, and tissues evolved into the extremely complex organs which convert acoustical energy and vibration into neurological impulses that inform survival decisions.

The second morning’s presentation on Kurtosis by Dr. Wei Qui had me on the edge of my seat – even while the presentation in Berlin’s nine-hour time zone difference was at my circadian 11pm. Kurtosis is a term I’ve been flogging for years – informed by the work of Dr. Wei, and also by the work of Hamernik and Ahroon. Their research was largely funded by Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) so the objective was to determine what variables might impact hearing and workplace safety. (I will be excavating Dr. Wei’s address in greater detail in a future piece.)

Dr. Louise Roberts knocked it out of the park for me with her presentation on biotremology – how animals across all taxa from copepods to elephants, communicate through substrate vibration. I have already excavated this in another newsletter, and like Dr. Wei Qui’s presentation on Kurtosis, I predict that this presentation to the Aquatic Noise participants will be a game changer in our field.

There were a lot of folks in the bioacoustics community focused on Offshore Wind (“OSW” in the biz). Andrew Gill  with CEFAS gave a broad overview of OSW from the lens of the industrialization of the ocean (noise, industrial activities, ship traffic, EMF from power cables, etc.).  As I’ve been wallowing in this for a couple of years, there were no surprises here for me, but I’m sure the presentation raised eyebrows for others in the conference.

The mornings started with keynotes, and then led into presentation papers intersecting various aspects of sound and noise that don’t typically fall under the scrutiny of the public – and thus regulators, but nonetheless comprise very real elements of ocean health. Among these was a session on “Noise effects on lesser-known taxa,” which included noise impacts research on scallops, mussels, and seagrass(!).

Noise accompanies all we do in the ocean. As we industrialize the sea, these noises become greater and more pervasive. This is aggravated by the way sound couples so efficiently in water; it is not hard to make a sound in water that can be heard 1000 km away. But our regulations, and thus our mitigations orient toward “species of concern” – critters with which we sympathize – mostly marine mammals, or animals that are “protected” due to our historic destructive interactions with their populations.

Introducing the “broad swath of stakeholders” to some of the more nuanced discussions on marine bioacoustics – from biological, physical, and regulatory perspectives, definitely advances the conversation, which has historically been lugubrious on account of the otherwise siloed disciplines and stakeholders.