Episode 2: What does the ocean sound like?
Episode Description: Whales whisper, volcanoes rumble, and fish sing at sunset. In this episode of Oceanography, host Clark Marchese explores the science of underwater sound with marine biologist and bioacoustics researcher Dr. Jesús Alcázar-Treviño. You'll learn how toothed whales use echolocation to hunt in the deep sea, how volcanic eruptions reshape marine soundscapes, and why some whales may be mistaking plastic for prey. We also dive into the impacts of human-made noise—like shipping and seismic testing—on marine ecosystems. With fascinating stories from the Canary Islands and deep-sea research insights, this episode is your gateway into the hidden world of ocean acoustics and marine conservation.
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Episode Guest: Dr. Jesús Alcázar Treviño
Learn more about Dr. Jesús Alcázar Treviño here
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Hosted, produced, and edited by Clark Marchese
Cover art by Jomiro Eming
Theme music by Nela Ruiz
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Transcript:
Clark Marchese (00:11.342)
Hello there, and thank you so much for joining us here on Oceanography, the podcast that dives deep into the science of our oceans, the latest in marine research, and the scientists working hard to better understand and protect our blue planet. And today we are learning all about bioacoustics.
Clark Marchese (00:49.952)
All right. This is our second ever episode. If you were here with us last week, thank you for coming back. My name is Clark Marchese and I am your host for this podcast, Oceanography, which is one of many in the Pine Forest Media Network of Environmental Science podcasts. This is the place where every week we come together to listen to scientists from all over the world about everything you can think of under the sea. And today we need our listening ears more than ever.
As a podcaster, I'm perhaps unsurprisingly interested in all things audio, so it may not be a shock that this is only our second episode and we are already here. Investigating the sound of the ocean on oceanography was actually inspired by a book I stumbled across at the book lounge, if you know you know. And if you like this podcast, I can probably recommend it to you. It is called Eloquence of the Sardine, Extraordinary Encounters Beneath the Sea by Bill Francois.
It is both beautifully written and a quite easy read, so I suggest it for a beach day, actually if you really want to romanticize your life. It is, among other things, an exploration into the hidden languages of the ocean, exploring how marine creatures use sound, movement, and even bioluminescence to communicate in ways we're only beginning to understand. So today on Oceanography, it's all about sound. Sound is majorly important in the ocean. It truly influences how entire ecosystems function.
In this episode, we're going to explore the underwater symphony that keeps marine ecosystems running. We'll learn how toothed whales, like sperm whales and dolphins, use bioacoustics to socialize and hunt. We'll talk about what happens when a submarine volcano erupts and alters the entire ocean soundscape. And we'll confront the reality of human noise pollution, what it means for marine species, and what we can do about it. Today, our guest is the perfect person to guide us through all of this. Dr. Jesus Trevino is a bioacoustics researcher in biodiversity and conservation at the Universidad de la Laguna in Tenerife. Dr. Trevino has spent years studying bioacoustics. Many of his publications will be referenced in our conversation. We covered a lot of ground in this episode, and we're about to jump into it. But just before we do, if you are enjoying oceanography and you want to support science communication, I would ask you to consider joining our Patreon, which can be found in the episode description. For as little as $3 a month, you can help us keep this show going and others like it.
Clark Marchese (03:00.342)
and a portion of the Patreon proceeds will go to support science communication and research projects that our contributors get to help us choose. And as I said, you can find that in the episode description. I would also invite you to give us a one tap five star review that really helps this show reach more people. And while you're there, we'd love to hear what you think about the show so far. All right, with that, I think we can go ahead and get started.
Clark Marchese (03:30.838)
Alright, we are recording. Well, why don't you start by telling us a little bit about yourself?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño
Well, thank you so much for having me here. My name is Jesus Alcázar Treviño. I'm a Spanish marine biologist and I'm currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of La Laguna, which is located in Tenerife in the Canary Islands. It is so wonderful to meet you. I'm actually very excited to have you on the show today because as someone with a podcast, it might make sense that I would be interested in things having to do with audio and sound. But let me ask you though, how did you get interested in bioacoustics?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño
Yeah, sure. Well, I guess this started long ago when I was a kid snorkeling in northern Spain. And I still remember how different hearing is, like when you put your goggles on and you're just inside the water and then everything seems muffled. At first it's like Cousteau said, this thing of the silent world. But then you start realizing that it is not. There are so many sounds. That was the first time I was interested in the underwater acoustics. And then of course, moving on at the university and all of that, like with more biology knowledge, it was even more interesting for me.
Clark Marchese (04:54.946)
Perhaps some definitions are in order. Let's start with the most obvious one. Can you tell us what we mean when we say bioacoustics?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño
Yeah, well, this is always a tricky question because there will be like many different definitions. But I guess we could say that the bioacoustics is branch of science that is dedicated to study everything related to sound production and perception by organisms. So it would involve, it's quite interdisciplinary science that involves biology, but also physics. And it has all to do with the vocal production, but also with the ear and sound perception. So yeah, I guess that will be a general definition. There are many kinds of sounds. I said vocal because it's like the most common, the ones we made. And that's important because many other sounds that are even not intentional, let's say, like mastication sounds, the chewing. Those are part of bioacoustics and could be detected like by con specifics but also by predators or by prey. So every sound plays a role even if it is intentional or not.
Clark Marchese
Would bioacoustics be interchangeable with the marine soundscape or is there a distinction there that we need to make?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño (06:19.532)
Yeah, this soundscape would be for this case in a given area, marine area, all the sounds that happened there. involves usually when we talk about soundscape, we have like three components. The biophonies are called, these are all the biological sounds. Then the geophony that are all the non-biological but natural sounds, like the crashing waves, the rain, thunder, and all of that. And then the anthrophony that of course, are the human made noise.
Clark Marchese
Okay, we are going to circle back to the human-made noises and what impacts those have. But now that we have those definitions, I am curious how your research addresses these topics. Are there any sounds or any organisms that you are specifically interested in or have studied in the past?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño
Yeah, well, I'm changing throughout my research career, so I'm quite curious. So I've been changing. For my PhD thesis here at the University of La Laguna, we studied some cetaceans, some toothed whales that are called bithed whales because they have this long snout. And these are deep divers. I mean, really deep divers, they go for hunt, like more than 1000 meters depth. And they, at these depths, There are no light. There is no light there. So they need to use sound to locate their prey. So here with a super cool team of international researchers, we placed some instruments, some tags attached to the whales with suction cups. So no harm. And you will put hydrophones in those. So hydrophones are like say simply
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño (08:04.106)
microphones used for underwater recordings. So we could record the sounds that each tagged whale were emitting down there. And yeah, we studied those, like how they use for hunting and for communicating, because as I said, at more than 1000 meters depth communicating with each other of the same group, it has to be using sound because there are no visual cues. So yeah, that was like my PhD studies. And now I'm focusing more on a more holistic view with all of this soundscape. Now I've been in a research group from the Spanish Oceanographic Institute, and we were studying the marine soundscape around submarine volcanoes here at the Canary Islands. So yeah, this involves again all the whales that are here, but also fish invertebrates and yeah, the volcanic eruptions.
Clark Marchese
Okay, I'm going to ask you questions about both of those things. Let's start with the whales. You mentioned that they use sound to communicate. So can you tell us what that might look like or sound like rather and if we know what they might be trying to communicate?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño
Yeah, this is quite different between whale families because we have like all the typical dolphin stereotype. Dolphins, they can do most everything. They're incredible and very versatile. They typically use echolocation clicks are called that are like these sounds to look for prey, but then to communicate with each other, they use whistles. So yeah, they literally whistle to each other to communicate. But then these big whales that hunt at depth with my PhD advisor, we found out that they were like so, so extremely afraid of being hunted by orcas, by killer whales, that they do not normally use these whistles. So for them, that's shallow water of less than 200 meters. For us, that would be like terribly deep, 200 meters. But for them, that's shallow. And till they have reached that depth,
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño (10:11.008)
they emit no sound. So they are completely silent. So orcas cannot detect them near the surface. But then once they are deep down at more than 1,000 meters depth, they separate and start echolocating. And each one of them is hunting separately. But then with these tags, we put on them that they have magnetometers and accelerometers. So we could also calculate their heading and where were they traveling to, we saw that they were all going in the same general direction. And this could only be coordinated by their sounds. Like they were all here and deciding where to go. And then without any other specific sounds, only with their collocation clicks, orienting towards them, they reunited again and go up to the surface to breathe.
Clark Marchese
Wow, that is fascinating. recap. Sun whales use sound to locate prey and to coordinate with other members of their pod, which is an interesting example of echolocation. I don't know if I've ever heard of that happening in the ocean. Is that something that's common in the marine environment?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño
In the oceans, there's only the toothed that collocate. For example, all the pinnipeds that are the seals and all of that, they do not collocate. No, so, so far only the toothed whales. But well, I'm saying only, but there are like many species of toothed whales, like all the dolphins collocate, then also the river dolphins, then the beluga, the narwhal, the sperm whale. For this, we have to take into account the different species and the sounds they made. Whales in general, that term is a common term, but for scientists, there are like two big super families of whales that are the baleen whales and the toothed whales. The toothed whales are all of those that use sound to echolocate, and most of those sounds are produced at high frequencies. So the problem with high frequency in physics
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño (12:17.12)
is that underwater it gets absorbed quickly so it cannot travel very far. They use it because high frequency gives like a higher definition when it bounces in an object. So it's good for echolocation. But at great distances it gets absorbed in water. And in the other hand, the baleen whales, these are like the common whales, the big, big, big ones, like the Blue Whale, the Humpback Whale and all of those. These use low frequency sounds, but like super low frequency and these sounds are not absorbed so easily so they can travel like really, really far. And this is then an oceanographic characteristic in the open deep ocean. There is this layer of water. It changes between oceans, like, yeah, at some 1000 meters depth where sounds get reflected. because there are some differences between temperature and salinity, so it's like a different layer of water, and one of these sounds can get, like say, trapped in there and travel really, really long distances. So yeah, for these whales, like mostly the blue whale, that's the one that emits at the lowest frequencies, that's for example, it's so, so low that we couldn't hear it. So yeah, those can communicate like even hundreds of or more of kilometers.
Clark Marchese
Okay, so these large baleen whales with the low frequencies, if they're not using sound to hunt, do we know what it is that they're trying to communicate with one another?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño
Yeah, wow, communication is really difficult to study in the wild. yeah, most studies are assuming or getting information regarding the open ocean is really vast and these whales are so big that they need to ingest really large quantities of prey. So they are not normally really close.
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño (14:15.062)
Like most of these animals are solitary and they are traveling and then when they need to mate, that's the problem. Like you have to find each other. And yeah, this is the animal world. yeah, they need to... a male has to find a female. So otherwise there will be no offspring. So yeah, normally it is thought that mostly the males do the singing. It's like an advertising. They are the rock stars and let's see which female approaches. Then there are other whales that emit other sounds like the common... the fin whale. The fin whale is the second largest one, just like the blue whale, but just a little smaller. It produces another sound discovered recently that seems to be an advertising like for a nice food patch area. So like, there's krill and fish here. Let's all come to it here.
Clark Marchese
I was just thinking with all these curiosities coming to my mind about what sorts of sounds there are in the ocean. And you said back when you were first getting interested in snorkeling and realizing that in fact it's not so silent as people might have thought it was and that there are in fact lots of sounds. I'm wondering when did the scientific community start to become interested in studying bioacoustics? Is this sort of an older or newer field of study? When and maybe how did it come about?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño
Yeah, this sadly, as many other science branches, it started with the war. Yeah, was the trying to locate the Nazi submarines was really important. And then Soviets and Americans, yeah, you know how it works. So yeah, that's when so many engineers and scientists started putting some auriculars and listening to the sounds there. And that's when they started like cataloguing like saying, okay, these are whales. And then there was such a funny moment when some, I don't remember quite well. I don't remember if that was the Americans or who that were like really puzzled with some sounds, some kind of popping sounds, like saying, wow, which kind of submarine is this? And then some years later, a super nice and cool researcher, I think from Sweden.
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño (16:30.732)
discovered that those were herring farts. So some fishes were expelling some gas just to control their buoyancy. And they were driving the Americans crazy thinking they were some kind of submarine there.
Clark Marchese
Okay, that's hilarious. And I don't think I was expecting you to say that it came out of a wartime research project, but after you started explaining it, it made lots of sense. think we would probably be surprised to learn about how many scientific discoveries came out of sort of military research. But I will have to probably do a deep dive after this to learn more about it. Okay, we're covering a lot of ground today, but now I want to talk about volcanoes, which is another area of bioacoustics that you've been researching, specifically how marine volcanic activity impacts organisms. Can you tell us about any of the research you've engaged with on this topic?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño
Yeah, so this project is mainly led by the Spanish Oceanographic Institute. We have two recent volcanic eruptions in the Canary Islands. So the first one was in 2011, and this was near El Hierro Island. And this is a submarine volcano. So it didn't reach the surface. It stayed at, think it was 84 meters depth. And then in 2021 we had this Cumbre Vieja eruption in the island of La Palma. This was an aerial eruption but the lava flows reached the sea and reached like quite down the sea, even forming new lava deltas. So yeah, the Spanish Oceanographic Institute was there both times and luckily they were deploying hydrophones because we wanted to study how these eruptions were impacting in the soundscape and in the biodiversity of the area.
Clark Marchese
Well, it's easy to imagine that a volcanic eruption could be a fairly catastrophic event in the marine environment for a number of reasons. But were you able to isolate any of the consequences that could be attributable only to the sound that the volcano made?
So I'm going to talk about the two volcanoes because they are quite different scenarios. For the first one, the submarine one, we don't have recordings from the event, but we have recordings like from after. The Spanish Oceanographic Institute is deploying moorings with hydrophones and other sensors every year. So yeah, at first, that volcano for sure was quite destructive.
So it formed a lava plume in the water that depleted in oxygen all the area. So the fish died and the dolphins fled. But then quite rapidly, the ecosystem recovered and some researchers discovered that in fact, now that the volcano is emitting gases and other nutrients, but like at a slow pace now that it is not erupting, it is enhancing the productivity there.
So now it is quite the opposite. It came from a destructive scenario to kind of an oasis there because it is surrounded by deep waters and suddenly a shallow water mound. It's quite the oasis. And yeah, and we are studying the marine soundscape there and it is quite diverse. So we have fishes living there. We have invertebrates. We are hearing and detecting a lot of dolphins, and big whales, and also we have recently detected the passing of some of the biggest whales, like the blue whale, the fin whale. So it is quite a recovered ecosystem. And since it is a marine reserve, there is not so much like vessel traffic. So that is quite good. And then in La Palma, while the volcano was erupting, we have not quite the same scenario, but while the lava flows were reaching the sea,
Obviously where they touched that was catastrophic also and it had an affection area but it was not so large as the El Hierro and it is now also recovering quickly. Some of the botanics colleagues from the university are going there every, I don't know, three or four months and they are seeing like a quick recovery. All the algae are establishing there followed by the fish. So yeah, and what we were detecting during the eruption, we were fascinated by many, many, many low frequency, like super impulsive, which means that they have like great energy sounds. And we started to investigate that because it happened only in the recordings while the eruption was going on, because then we went back and recorded one year after and there were no such sounds. So we started researching those. We got in contact with, again, with an interdisciplinary team of physics and also geologists and seismologists. And we discovered, to our surprise, that what we were recording were earthquakes. So associated to the eruption, there were like many, many, many earthquake swarms. And this is normal, but the earthquakes being detected in the water column, it's not so normal in the way we detected those. Because normally these sounds are detected by seabed, more hydrophones or accelerometers, or if they are detected by a floating hydrophone, this has to be in this water channel that I talk about, like at 1000 meters depth and far away when the signal travels. But yeah, we were detecting all those earthquakes with a hydrophone floating like that 2 to 3 meters above the seabed in a 77 meters depth of water column.
Clark Marchese
That's super interesting. And it makes me have another question that applies to both of these earthquakes that you were speaking about. Because one thing we know about organisms that are thriving or doing well in their environment is because they have evolved to be best fit in that environment, which they find themselves in, right? And that environment includes the soundscape. So in the aftermath of these volcanoes, whether it was because of these low frequency earthquakes, or due to the sounds that will be produced by all of the organisms that contribute to the affected area becoming more biologically productive than it once was. Will these changes in the soundscape have any impact on the animals that were used to the old soundscape or the old conditions? Might it impact or interfere with their behaviors in any way?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño
Yeah, like this is really difficult to study because yeah, there are not so many underwater eruptions going on and in places like of easy access. But yeah, we are trying to study those questions. Probably the most affected animals would be the ones that use low frequencies because all of these like earthquakes and geological sounds, most of them happen at low frequencies. So some fishes and mostly the baleen whales would be the ones that maybe their sounds, their communication sounds could be masked by all of these geological events. But luckily for the big baleen whales, they move like in great large ranges. So we guess it wouldn't be like a super problem for them. But yes, for the fish that most of them are more local.
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño (24:09.662)
And yeah, they could be disrupted by that. Yeah, moreover, it depends on the area, but in most underwater soundscape, the fish produce, some of the fish produce what we call an evening chorus. That means that where the sun is setting, many fish like start making sounds. So you can detect that by analyzing. And during La Palma eruption, really, really close to where the lava was entering the ocean. this chorus stopped. So we don't know if that was because the fish were getting displaced from the area or because they couldn't hear well each other.
Clark Marchese
Do we know why they are doing the sunset chorus?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño
Yeah, this is the trickiest question of all. Because it's like many different species do this and depending on the species, it's a different chorus. Like the sound is different. The term is chorus because there is like many sounds, like many fishes producing the same or quite similar sound. So when you analyze it, you see like a pattern there. We discovered one of those chorusing sounds here in the Canary Islands, but in deep waters that was quite similar to one discovered in Australia. And this was related to some really big biomass of deep water fish that they migrate every evening near the surface to forage. And then just before the sun came up again, they migrate back to the deep. So we are not sure if it is intentional to coordinate.
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño (25:50.146)
their migration or maybe if it is unintentional in the sense that maybe to control their buoyancy like the herring, they are expelling gas and this gas then explodes and produces this sound. But then there are other choruses that are just other researchers think that like the shallow water choruses, fish choruses, they are just a communication or maybe for spawning. like for spawning season or the fish communicate like this is the time, the right time so they coordinate
Clark Marchese
Like I did a little digging, it seems to be a phenomenon that is not all that uncommon, but the hypothesis for the causes depends a lot on the species and the location in question. For example, in this Pacific Ocean, scientists discovered that snapping shrimp create an overwhelming crackling sound that could be compared to the sound of bacon, which they believe to be perhaps for a predator deterrence. Also in the Great Barrier Reef, we see many examples of the so-called sunset chorus, which makes sense. Side note, I would be very curious to learn about the specifics of the soundscape of the Great Barrier Reef. Another thing that I found that was interesting is that some scientists believe that monitoring these sunset choruses provide a useful acoustic indicator of biodiversity loss and overall ecosystem health. I also found an article titled, Soundscape Learning, an Automatic Method for Separating Fish Chorus and Marine Soundscapes. Now, get in touch with me. If you'd like me to contact the authors and see if they'd like to come on the show, we can do an episode all about it. Okay, we are going to shift gears again. And one thing we will continue to explore here on Oceanography is human interaction and human impact on the ocean. It came up a bit already earlier in the show when you mentioned the word androphony. Can you tell us what that is and what sorts of sounds we humans are adding to the ocean?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño (27:42.454)
Yeah, this is like really big because almost anything that happens in the ocean or near or above it would be impacting somehow because like one little thing like a fishing gear with a buoy there, it's making sound, of course, all the vessel traffic. Vessel traffic is probably like the most concerning because it's so widespread. And then we have I think the most dangerous one are all the sounds related to seismic exploration that it is done to look for fossil fuels. So for looking for fossil fuels in the ocean, it employs air explosions underwater and this produced like a super, super strong sound signal that has been proven to affect many organisms. to the point of leading to death of many organisms.
Clark Marchse
Gosh, okay. Well, I mean, if it's leading to organisms dying, that's obviously a negative impact. But is there any research out there that's establishing a link between these human impacts and perhaps organisms' ability to perform their ecosystem functions?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño
Yeah, for the first part, curiously, think the explosions are not the most dangerous part because they are quite localized, but it is the sound they produce. In the case of cetaceans, that is what I'm more know about. It's because their habit alteration, like the behavioral alteration they produce in them. Because this was again studied by other super researchers with these big whales.
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño (29:25.334)
that dive so, so deep. These animals have like a physiological constraint. They are always at their limit and they have to perform like quite the steps for their deep dives to going up again, something similar to the diver's disease because they are exposed to great pressures down there. And then going up, this could result in a bubble formation in the bloodstream, for example. So... they go like they ascend in a slant angle and all that. And then if they it happens to occur one of these tremendous sound from an explosion or from a military sonar, for these animals it triggers the flea response. For them, we guess it might be like the biggest, the mother of all the orcas. It's just up above them. So they get so scared, so scared that they disrupt their normal behavior. and they go up like vertical. And this is so sad because it's literally destroyed them because they have been found here like with eyes, bleeding eyes. They get ashore. Yeah, it's terrible for those animals. In fact, in here, I think it was 2004 and 2007, near the Canary Islands, there were some military exercises using this special sonar. and many big whales washed ashore. But this elicited such a response from the general public that a military ban was extended. I don't know, I don't remember how many miles surrounded the Canary Islands. Now it is forbidden to do this. But then in the open ocean, anybody could do most anything. So those whales are at peril.
Clark Marchese (31:27.79)
Another question I have about human impacts on the ocean, which I don't know if this constitutes as andorphony in a direct sense, but it is in reference to sound and human impact. Most people will be aware at this point that ocean plastic is a major global concern. And I came across an article that you worked on that discusses plastic and bioacoustics. You can certainly explain it better than I can, so can you tell me about this research and its findings?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño
Yeah, sure. We were investigating because many of the stranded or cetaceans that wash ashore, once the veterinarians, the vets perform necrosis on them, they usually find that they have quite a large amount of plastic in their stomachs. So we were wondering if this is like... intentional or not, in the sense of they are like engulfed in plastic because it's out there in the water and they don't see it. Or most of this plastic appears in the stomach of toothed so the whales that use a collocation. Most of them where you cannot see anything because they are deep divers. Or in the case of many dolphins, many of them also forage during the night. So in almost lightless conditions. So maybe the problem is if they cannot distinguish between the acoustic signature of the returning echo from the collocation of the plastic and their prey. So we used an echo sounder that it is an instrument that produces like sound pings, but we have one of those portable echo sounder and within a tank here in the Spanish Oceanographic Institute, we perform like a novel experiment where we enzoned many different kinds and types of plastics in different composition and shape and also natural prey from these cetaceans. And then we processed all of that data and we found out that yeah, for some plastics we couldn't distinguish the acoustic signature of the plastic with some of the squids. So yeah, yeah, lead us to think that some of these mostly the deep divers
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño (33:38.22)
they cannot distinguish correctly using acoustics, their preferred prey from plastic. So they are getting tons of plastics in their stomachs and dying. So yeah, this is by acoustics in other terms, because yeah, we are trying to emulate the normal behavior of these animals in a tank without using captive animals. So it's tricky, but we are trying to study that.
Clark Marchese
That is fascinating and as I said I think many people will have already known that plastic ends up inside of whale's stomachs. I think the whale itself has become sort of a symbol in the fight against plastic pollution. But I think people may have assumed as I did that this happens because the whales have like really big mouths. But you've definitely just taught us something new today. And wow, we have covered quite a lot haven't we? You did say though that you had a lot of curiosities about the ocean as far as research goes. Although, I want to ask you if there are any burning research questions that you have as an individual researcher or that you think the field of bioacoustics has yet to answer or that fascinates you the most.
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño
So we have like many in reality. And yeah, I think we could like classify. Yeah, I'm a biologist. So I'd like to classify everything in like three different types. Like one of is like the pure research, for example, for pure research, I'm fascinated by the acoustic localization. That is we use more than one normally it's three or more hydrophones to locate the origin of the sound. So this has tons of applications. There are already researchers doing this. But for some scenarios, it's quite difficult. But here, for example, it would be great to have this acoustic localization between islands because of these fast ferries that are operating between the islands. And sometimes, they track sperm whales. So if we could be acoustically localizing, like in real time,
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño (35:42.008)
the groups of sperm whales passing around these fast ferry lines, we could warn in real time the captains of the ferry.
Clark Marchese
That is fascinating, but I thought you were gonna say we could warn the whales in real time. Maybe one day.
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño
Yeah, well, I would love that.
Clark Marchese
So what else do you want to know?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño
So yeah, that's more like a pure science applied to conservation. Then more like conservation. There are ways that are so, so endangered that just trying to hear from them, it's like a big achievement. So yeah, we are deploying hydrophones all through the islands trying to...
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño (36:25.632)
locate as many different animals as possible. And the other big part that I am quite interested in would be this science outreach, like the approach to the general public. And luckily now with the Spanish Oceanographic Institute at the university, we are starting a new project with the tourism, the Blue Tourism Agency of the Canary Islands. So we are trying to do basic research, applied research, and translate all of that to a more general public language. So yeah, so we can impact in the blue tourism with things as simple as, well, here, these clicks that you are listening to when you are taking a swim in the beach, yeah, those are snapping shrimp. They're just shrimp. But I guess that simple question, maybe it approaches the tourist to the destination in a more like...not only, okay, we are drinking margaritas here and we are going and leaving all behind, destroying everything. So more like try to preserve the destination.
Clark Marchese
Those are really, really interesting directions of research. I hope you get to investigate all of them. And if you do, we'll have you back on the show and we can talk about what you found out. As we start to round out to the end of the episode, what is your favorite part about being a marine researcher?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño (37:54.862)
I would say definitely the best part is going out there in the ocean. Like all the times I've been there it's quite magic. It sounds cheesy but it is just like that. When you spend so many hours out there waiting, trying to see all this elusive and cryptic animal that only lives here or it is so difficult to watch and then you have it there, it's the best. Yeah. Yeah, of course then it is nice to work with a computer analyzing all of that and getting to conclusions like, they were hunting or they were communicating with each other. But yeah, my preferred part, it's definitely being out there in the ocean.
Clark Marchese
Well then based off of everything that we've discussed today, my next question is, is there anything that we missed either having to do with the topics that we already covered about your research more generally? Basically, what would we kick ourselves for forgetting if we happen to forget it?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño
Only thing I would like to do is thank all the sponsors and all the public funding we get to do this. And yeah, I think we are pretty much committed since this is public money and we are doing science, it's our job to communicate it. So I really appreciate this invitation.
Clark Marchese
Well, I really appreciate you coming on the show because I wouldn't have known a lot of things that I know now if it weren't for you. And I think our listeners will have liked it as well. So then my last last question for you is if you would like to connect with them, where can listeners find you and follow your work?
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño (39:32.022)
Okay, so yeah, I guess the web of the university, Universidad de la Laguna has like many windows when you can see researchers and research groups. And then you can look, I don't know if you know about Research Gate, it's a web with where we put all our conferences and papers. And yeah, I guess in my professional blue sky.
Clark Marchese
Okay, well I will make sure that those are included in the episode description. And this is the part where I say thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. Thank you for teaching us all about bioacoustics and also for your really important research in the space.
Jesús Alcázar-Treviño
Well, thank you so much for having me.Clark Marchese (40:18.976)
Alright, let's give one last thank you to Dr. Jesus Alcazar-Travino and thank you all for listening this far. I hope you are enjoying oceanography. I had quite a lot of fun making this episode. But before we close out, I'll mention that if the plastic research that we talked about today was interesting, you might check out one of our other shows. It's called Plastic Podcast. You can find it wherever you're listening to this. On the show, we do learn a lot about plastic in the ocean, but we also learn about the economics of plastic waste.
I to clinical researchers about what we do and do not know about how plastic impacts human health. I also talked to activists and scientists who are submitting their own research to be considered in ongoing negotiations for a UN treaty on plastics pollution. I think it's a pretty interesting show. It just received an honorable mention from the Webby Awards for a limited series podcast about science. And being a limited series, you can binge it all and come right back to us on oceanography next week.
Clark Marchese (41:22.85)
You've been listening to Oceanography. Just a reminder to anyone who might be interested in helping us reach more people, continue making our shows and support other science communication initiatives, you can now join us on Patreon. That, a one tap five star rating or a written review wherever you're listening to this are the easiest and most effective ways you can help us out. Oceanography is a Pine Forest Media production. You can find more information about this podcast and this week's guests in the episode description.
The cover art for the show was done by Jomero Emming and the music listing too was done by Nila Ruiz. This show was hosted and edited by me, Clark Marchese, and you can find more information about Pine Forest Media and our other science podcasts at pineforestpaws.com or follow us on social media at pineforestmedia. All right, that is all I have for you now and see you right back here next week.
