Apr 28, 2024
seen from France
seen from Yemen
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from Australia
seen from Yemen
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from France
seen from India
seen from India
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from India
seen from Canada
seen from Chile
seen from Germany
seen from United States
Vangelis - the music of Carl Sagan's COSMOS (PBS, 1980)
Sound reveals giant blue whales dance with the wind to find food
https://sciencespies.com/environment/sound-reveals-giant-blue-whales-dance-with-the-wind-to-find-food/
Sound reveals giant blue whales dance with the wind to find food
A study by MBARI researchers and their collaborators published today in Ecology Letters sheds new light on the movements of mysterious, endangered blue whales. The research team used a directional hydrophone on MBARI’s underwater observatory, integrated with other advanced technologies, to listen for the booming vocalizations of blue whales. They used these sounds to track the movements of blue whales and learned that these ocean giants respond to changes in the wind.
Along California’s Central Coast, spring and summer bring coastal upwelling. From March through July, seasonal winds push the top layer of water out to sea, allowing the cold water below to rise to the surface. The cooler, nutrient-rich water fuels blooms of tiny phytoplankton, jumpstarting the food web in Monterey Bay, from small shrimp-like krill all the way to giant whales. When the winds create an upwelling event, blue whales seek out the plumes of cooler water, where krill are most abundant. When upwelling stops, the whales move offshore into habitat that is transected by shipping lanes.
“This research and its underlying technologies are opening new windows into the complex, and beautiful, ecology of these endangered whales,” said John Ryan, a biological oceanographer at MBARI and lead author of this study. “These findings demonstrate a new resource for managers seeking ways to better protect blue whales and other species.”
The directional hydrophone is a specialized underwater microphone that records sounds and identifies the direction from which they originate. To use this technology to study blue whale movements, researchers needed to confirm that the hydrophone reliably tracked whales. This meant matching the acoustic bearings to a calling whale that was being tracked by GPS. With confidence in the acoustic methods established, the research team examined two years of acoustic tracking of the regional blue whale population.
This study built upon previous research led by MBARI Senior Scientist Kelly Benoit-Bird, which revealed that swarms of forage species — anchovies and krill — reacted to coastal upwelling. This time, researchers combined satellite and mooring data of upwelling conditions and echosounder data on krill aggregations with the acoustic tracks of foraging blue whales logged by the directional hydrophone.
“Previous work by the MBARI team found that when coastal upwelling was strongest, anchovies and krill formed dense swarms within upwelling plumes. Now, we’ve learned that blue whales track these dynamic plumes, where abundant food resources are available,” explained Ryan.
advertisement
Blue whales recognize when the wind is changing their habitat and identify places where upwelling aggregates their essential food — krill. For a massive animal weighing up to 150 tonnes (165 tons), finding these dense aggregations is a matter of survival.
While scientists have long recognized that blue whales seasonally occupy Monterey Bay during the upwelling season, this research has revealed that the whales closely track the upwelling process on a very fine scale of both space (kilometers) and time (days to weeks).
“Tracking many individual wild animals simultaneously is challenging in any ecosystem. This is especially difficult in the open ocean, which is often opaque to us as human observers,” said William Oestreich, previously a graduate student at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station and now a postdoctoral fellow at MBARI. “Integration of technologies to measure these whales’ sounds enabled this important discovery about how groups of predators find food in a dynamic ocean. We’re excited about the future discoveries we can make by eavesdropping on blue whales and other noisy ocean animals.”
Background
Blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) are the largest animals on Earth, but despite their large size, scientists still have many unanswered questions about their biology and ecology. These gentle giants seasonally gather in the Monterey Bay region to feed on small shrimp-like crustaceans called krill.
advertisement
Blue whales are elusive animals. They can travel large distances underwater very quickly, making them challenging to track. MBARI researchers and collaborators employed a novel technique for tracking blue whales — sound.
MBARI’s MARS (Monterey Accelerated Research System) observatory offers a platform for studying the ocean in new ways. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the cabled observatory provides continuous power and data connectivity to support a variety of instruments for scientific experiments.
In 2015, MBARI researchers installed a hydrophone, or underwater microphone, on the observatory. The trove of acoustic data from the hydrophone has provided important insights into the ocean soundscape, from the migratory and feeding behaviors of blue whales to the impact of noise from human activities.
In 2019, MBARI and the Naval Postgraduate School installed a second hydrophone on the observatory. The directional hydrophone gives the direction from which a sound originated. This information can reveal spatial patterns for sounds underwater, identifying where sounds came from. By tracking the blue whales’ B call — the most powerful and prevalent vocalization among the regional blue whale population — researchers could follow the movements of individual whales as they foraged within the region.
Researchers compared the directional hydrophone’s recordings to data logged by tags that scientists from Stanford University had previously deployed on blue whales. Validating this new acoustic tracking method opens new opportunities for simultaneously logging the movements of multiple whales. It may also enable animal-borne tag research by helping researchers find whales to tag. “The integrated suite of technologies demonstrated in this paper represents a transformative tool kit for interdisciplinary research and mesoscale ecosystem monitoring that can be deployed at scale throughout protected marine habitats. This is a game changer and brings both cetacean biology and biological oceanography to the next level,” said Jeremy Goldbogen, an associate professor at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station and a coauthor of the study.
This new methodology has implications not only for understanding how whales interact with their environment and one another but also for advancing management and conservation.
Despite protections, blue whales remain endangered, primarily from the risk of collisions with ships. This study showed that blue whales in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary regularly occupy habitat transected by shipping lanes. Acoustic tracking of whales may provide real-time information for resource managers to mitigate risk, for example, through vessel speed reduction or rerouting during critical periods. “These kinds of integrated tools could allow us to spatially and temporally monitor, and eventually even predict, ephemeral biological hotspots. This promises to be a watershed advancement in the adaptive management of risks for protected and endangered species,” said Brandon Southall, president and senior scientist for Southall Environmental Associates Inc. and a coauthor of the research study.
Support for this research was provided by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. The National Science Foundation funded the installation and maintenance of the MARS cabled observatory through awards 0739828 and 1114794. Directional acoustic processing work was supported by the Office of Naval Research, Code 32. Tag work was funded in part by the National Science Foundation (IOS-1656676), the Office of Naval Research (N000141612477), and a Terman Fellowship from Stanford University.
#Environment
A Trip to Infinity (2022), Science Documentary Film
happy traveling ✌🏾👨🏿🚀🌊
Thoughts on the new Dino Hunters TV Show.
So, if you follow paleontology or are the type of person constantly on the lookout for new paleo-documentary series you may have come across this in the past week:
https://youtu.be/TumWvTs9AHU
It's the trailer for a new series on Discovery Channel called Dino Hunters that will follow many figures in the commercial fossil trade, many of which are controversial. Just from the promos they have released it is clear that this show is less interested in the science and more interested in portraying fossil hunting as some sort of new "gold rush," where the average Joe dinosaur cowboy can dig up a skeleton and strike it rich.
The problem with this isn't that people are able to make a sustainable living off of the fossil trade, the problem is that many of the best fossils found by commercial fossil collectors end up in the hands of private collectors that may or may not be inclined to make said finds available for scientific study. A single, well preserved fossil of a rare specimen may yield decades or centuries of scientific data, which really lends perspective to the amount of knowledge that can be lost when profits are put ahead of study.
I'm not saying that all commercial fossil hunters are bad, there are actually quite a few that donate or prioritize sales to institutes of study and make a profit off of either making casts of large skeletons they have found or selling smaller less significant finds.
The majority of the people involved in Dino Hunters are not the types of fossil hunters who donate their finds or appear to care about science. Clayton Phipps, discoverer of the now famous Dueling Dinosaurs fossil that contains a Tyrannosaur and a Chasmosaur, appears to be going over the top with his reality show persona, complete with costume that makes him look like less like a fossil hunter or even a real cowboy and more like a cowboy themed used car salesmen. He is still trying to promote the very dubious genus of Nanotyrannus, probably because that makes the fossils more rare and thus more valuable when selling to collectors who know nothing about the science. He is in fact spotted in this promo saying that he "doesn't do the science work," and is just "a cowboy who likes to find dinosaurs," a line that sums up the tone of this show perfectly.
Discovery Channel has long since turned its back on good science documentaries and it's clear they are only interested in producing a show that fits a formula similar to that of Pawn Starts, Duck Dynsasty, or Tiger King. They want to chuck the facts and just show the average Joe striking it rich, and if they are morally or legally dubious then that's great because it ups the shock value. If you are looking for alternatives to this, I have some recommendations:
The first is a 3 part series airing 2 days before Dino Hunters on PBS called Prehistoric Road Trip, the series is hosted by Emilie Graslie (who also hosts a regular YouTube show called BrainScoop) takes you on a tour of the American West going to fossil sites and talking to experts, it looks to be very good -
https://www.pbs.org/show/prehistoric-road-trip/
The second is another awesome series from PBS that you can watch on YouTube called Eons, which regularly covers a large array of subjects surrounding paleontology -
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzR-rom72PHN9Zg7RML9EbA
Also on YouTube I would recommend the paleoart channel of Brian Engh, in particular I would recommend his series Jurassic Reimagined
https://www.youtube.com/user/DinosaursReanimated
On top of all of this I would recommend looking at streaming services like Curiosity Stream, its super cheap and has a lot of good paleo docs both new and old on there. If anyone else has any other interesting shows or YouTube channels to recommend, feel free to leave a comment.
19.04.20 I 8/30 days of productivity
Happy Orthodox Easter!! It wasn’t a very traditionally productive day but I enjoyed taking some time to relax and read, I re-watched one of my favourite episodes of the Cosmos: Possible Worlds (ep. 10 "A Tale of Two Atoms"), I highly recommend it if you love science and of course Dr. deGrasse Tyson is amazing! I also made an attempt to read The great Gatsby, I have tried trice so far but it never seems to stick... Kudos <3
The Elephant Queen offers an intimate look into the lives of elephants, but the documentary largely avoids threats the animals face.
A stirring scene in The Elephant Queen shows a herd of African elephants encountering an elephant’s remains on the barren savanna. Slowly, the elephants extend their trunks to gently touch the skull, lingering on its grooves as though they remember, and mourn, the elephant that was. It’s one of the film’s many intimate glimpses into the lives of elephants.
The family-friendly documentary debuts November 1 on the new streaming service Apple TV+. The Elephant Queen shies away from the larger forces — climate change, habitat loss and poaching — that threaten the subjects it beautifully portrays. But if you can look past that, and the sometimes-cheesy soundtrack and over-the-top narration, you’re left with an enjoyable film that generates compassion for these gentle giants.
The film, narrated by actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, centers on Athena, a 50-year-old matriarch, as she leads her herd across the Kenyan savanna. The local focus of the documentary is refreshing compared with the sweeping purview of series like Planet Earth. We meet the clan during good times, while the elephants play at a verdant water hole among the frogs, birds, insects and fish that also live there. The film benefits from this wider perspective. One memorable scene provides up-close detail of a totally bizarre behavior. On a slim branch overhanging the water hole, a dozen male foam-nest tree frogs clamor around a single female, whipping up a large, white foam mass into which the female lays eggs. Four days later, tadpoles drop from the foam into the water, only to get gobbled up by terrapins.
African elephants, zebras and a giraffe gather to drink at a watering hole on the Kenyan savanna in The Elephant Queen.
CREDIT: COURTESY OF APPLE
Such natural history nuggets, unfortunately, are sometimes offset by a cartoonish portrayal. Dung beetles take flight to the “Ride of the Valkyries,” and then a fight over a ball of dung gets exaggerated with fake punching and squeaking noises straight out of a comic book movie. Additionally, the documentary sometimes goes overboard with heavy-handed narration. For instance, the film opens with Ejiofor saying, “Oh wise and gentle soul, do you remember when we had it all? Do you dream of when we had to leave?”
The elephants are forced to leave as the water dries up due to an especially trying drought. The herd sets off on a 100-mile trek to a permanent water source, and Mimi, a newborn elephant, begins to struggle. As leader, Athena must balance the needs of the weakest against the whole herd, the film suggests. Scientifically, there’s support for her singular role in decision making, but viewers looking to learn about the intricacies of elephant society won’t find such detail here. Aside from some interesting tidbits — such as how killifish eggs get transported between ephemeral water holes by hitchhiking on mud-caked elephants — don’t expect to learn many new facts.
The film finds its footing as it progresses, quieting down the narration and soundtrack to just let the elephants be. When a young elephant dies and the herd mourns the loss, the filmmakers get out of the way and the moment speaks for itself. It’s a deeply moving reminder that other branches of the tree of life experience something like love and loss (SN: 2/26/19).
It’s a shame the film doesn’t leverage the affection and understanding it builds to shine a light on the ways in which humans endanger elephants and the creatures that depend on them. Aside from a brief nod to poaching just before the credits roll, the film ignores the existential threat human activity poses to these animals. The drought that spurs Athena and her family to move will likely become much more common with climate change.
Watch a trailer for The Elephant Queen.