[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: You and Me]

Alison Stewart: This is All Off It. I'm Alison Stewart. Today we're sharing some conversation hosted by Kousha Navidar here on All Off It. He stepped in as guest host when I was out. Let's get into another one of those conversations. This one's about marine noises and what it sounds like, to quote Sebastian, down where it's better, down where it's wetter, under the sea.

[MUSIC- The Little Mermaid: Under the Sea]

Kousha Navidar: Because of how sound moves through water, there's actually more noise down there where vibrations can travel farther and faster than the air, but those sounds are alien to us. We don't intuitively know how to make sense of them like we do with sound on land. You know who does know how to make sense of underwater sounds? It's underwater creatures. There's a new book called Sing Like a Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water. It explores the sonic world of the oceans, from coral that can "hear" without ears.

Hear is in quotation marks there, but they can hear without ears to the ways that beluga whales communicate something we might recognize as identity. To the global growl underwater caused by the shipping industry and how it's impacting ecosystems that rely heavily on the information that that sound carries. Joining me now is the author of the book Amorina Kingdon. Amorina, welcome to All Off It.

Amorina Kingdon: Thank you so much.

Kousha Navidar: It's wonderful to have you here. This book, I love the title, Sing Like a Fish. You write about how as a child, you noticed how sound works differently underwater, even if you didn't yet understand the science to explain it. For folks who haven't submerged in a while, can you remind us what it sounds like?

Amorina Kingdon: I think a lot of people have this experience. For me, it was when I was swimming with my brother and we were trying to play underwater and sound seems really muffled. Voices in particular really don't work. I think a lot of kids will stick their heads underwater and try to scream at each other, yell at each other, and they'll realize, like my brother and I did that sound, you can't hear each other, so you just start yelling bad words, of course.

[laughter]

Kousha Navidar: Right.

Amorina Kingdon: If you jump in a swimming pool or even sometimes if you're having a bath and you dunk your head and you just get this sense that sound doesn't really work down there. Like I said in the book, or like I realized where you can't perceive something, it's really hard for humans to imagine that it exists. I think a lot of Us just don't really think about it. Then the wonderful Captain Jacques Cousteau, back in the 1950s, of course, did a very famous movie called The Silent World, and this trope of the ocean and the sea as being quiet and silent just stuck.

It's only in the last couple decades that we've really started to listen to and untangle. There were people who were pioneers beforehand that were looking and listening underwater, but it's only in the last little while that we've really started to bring it into the mainstream of science.

Kousha Navidar: Now as an adult, what did you learn about this subject that made you say, "Hey, there's a book here"?

Amorina Kingdon: I was a staff writer for a magazine here in Victoria in British Columbia, called Hakai Magazine, and they do coastal science. Right away, Victoria, British Columbia, is situated in a really interesting little waterway. It's called the Salish Sea. We have the ports of Seattle, Vancouver, and Victoria all in one very small space. We also have a cruise ship port, we have two military bases, and we also have an endangered population of very beloved killer whales.

There's just a lot of sound science going on. There's a lot of discussion of animals underwater and how humans make sound underwater. I was working for Hakai Magazine and I was starting to find more and more stories where there was mention of humans having an impact or somehow interfering with animals' sound underwater. Whenever I heard this, I would just have this intuitive blip in my mind. I just wouldn't quite be able to picture it. I think of something like an oil spill or a ship strike, and I can see it. It makes sense to me when someone describes that as a problem, I'm like, "Oh, yes, that makes sense."

When I would hear about sound being a problem for animals, I would just think I just didn't quite get it. Then I started to get more and more stories about how sound can interfere with the interactions that animals have and the more that I understood those interactions and how critical they were. Sound can change cleaner RAS fish and the rate at which they try to clean their client fish. Sound can interact with or impact mother whales murmuring quietly to their babies to keep them close because whales don't have arms, they can't hold their babies. They keep in touch with little sounds, and when that's interrupted, they can get separated.

The more I learned, the more I learned. There's a fish in this part of the world called the plainfin midshipman. It is a very loud fish. Every spring, it will come up on the shore. Not on the shore, but, like, right at the shore, and it will hum for a mate. If you listen to it, you can actually hear it with a hydrophone, sometimes even above the water. I was lucky enough to hear these fish a few years ago, and I was just hooked. I was like, "Okay, I have to learn everything about how this sound works, about how these fish are making it." I just took off.

Kousha Navidar: Listeners, we're talking about the book Sing Like a Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water. We're here with the author, Amorina Kingdon. I understand you've recorded some of sounds that I'd like to play. I know you've brought us a piece of tape from Cape Cod that sounds like cusk eels and toadfish. What sounds they make. Tell us what we're about to hear.

Amorina Kingdon: I embarked on a quest to actually listen to fish. I got myself a little dip hydrophone, which is essentially a cord with a little microphone on the end that can hear sound underwater. I set out wherever I went reporting, wherever I went, I would put the hydrophone in the water and just see what I could hear. I could not, for the life of me, listen to fish. They're difficult to hear sometimes. A lot of the time, they have to be in the right season. You have to be in the right cove or the right bay. They can be tricky.

I was on Cape Cod, and this was a bright, sunny day. There was probably 30, 40 boats in a really narrow waterway. There was kids with ice cream and parents and sun, and everybody was having a fantastic time. You would believe it if you saw JFK over there. It was this very fancy Cape Cod, amazing summer day. I rented a paddleboard on the Bass River in West Dennis, or near West Dennis, and I was just basically drifting down this waterway with a hydrophone. Very precariously, now that I'm thinking about it. I really should have been safer.

Basically, there's boats passing me, and then I put the hydrophone in the water and because it was spring, and these are coastal estuary waterways, there's all these fish in the water that are trying to find each other to mate. One of the things about fish is that they use sound to mate for a very good reason. I apologize in advance if this is a little bit TMI, but when fish mate, they have to release their gametes together simultaneously because if it's in the water and you need them to mix, you need to do it pretty much at the same time.

A lot of fish will use sound to either find each other or coordinate their mating dance. They don't really have a choice because sound is the only way to find each other. I'm listening to these fish that are trying to mate underwater while I am drifting down the Bass River. Above it is summer Americana wonderfulness and then below the water is fish trying to find each other.

Kousha Navidar: I just want to point out we are not talking about the birds and the bees. We are talking about cusk-eel and toadfish, which is wonderful. It's a new take on a wonderful subject. You broke it on WNYC. That's what we're listening to. Let's listen to it right now. Here it is.

[fish sounds]

Amorina Kingdon: That [inaudible 00:08:54]

Kousha Navidar: What were you about to say as we bring that down? Go ahead.

Amorina Kingdon: Just how quiet it is underwater, considering that above the water was crazy and that toadfish is just calling for a mate and that's just a boop, boop, boop, trying to find its mate.

Kousha Navidar: That's the bubbling sound, is the toadfish?

Amorina Kingdon: Yes, boop, boop.

Kousha Navidar: [laughs] Let's listen to it again. Here it is.

[fish sounds]

That's the toadfish right there.

Amorina Kingdon: Yes, that's that little sound.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, wow.

Amorina Kingdon: He's calling for a mate. I think that clip. Actually, I'm not sure if you can skip ahead to about 45 seconds, but there's a cusk-eel in there as well.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, we have it just ending here, but maybe we can pull it up later for 45 seconds later on it. If you listen closely, I bet you can hear it saying, "Hey, baby. Hey, baby. Hey." [laughs]

Amorina Kingdon: If you think about it, if you're a fish, in the water, it's very murky. It was sandy water. I put my hand in and I couldn't see my hand below the surface. A lot of coastal waters are murky. If you're trying to find a mate to perpetuate your, whatever, your fish genes, then you're going to have to find them with sound because you're not going to see them and you're not going to touch them unless you're very lucky and you're probably not going to taste them. As for scent, that does work on a lower, smaller time or smaller space scale.

Kousha Navidar: Your last two chapters take a close look at human sounds and how they impact the marine soundscape and what you call the "global growl" caused by the shipping industry. How does that global growl, or I guess how might it impact the sensory experiences of an individual creature? Can you translate that to the impact on the ecosystem?

Amorina Kingdon: The global growl is definitely right because shipping noise permeates pretty much every corner of the ocean. It's been recorded at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. That's just because we ship a lot of stuff. Shipping lanes are around the world and they operate 24/7. Shipping noise, if you're right near a ship, it could be very, very harmful just in terms of hurting your actual ears or hurting your sensory ear cells, depending on what animal you are. When you're talking about shipping, you're often talking about more of a reduction in what scientists consider to be things like communication space or listening space.

For example, if you are a whale that relies on sound to keep in touch with your family, a shipping lane can reduce the space over which you can keep in touch with your family. Rather than hearing them over 10 kilometers, you can only hear them over 3 kilometers. Same goes for an animal that's listening for predators. If you're listening for the sounds of whales or seals that might be trying to eat you, you can hear it for a shorter distance if there's shipping noise in the area. The other thing that can happen when you have chronic noise, as anybody who's lived near a highway can probably tell you, this is true above the water too. We're just starting to understand how chronic noise can affect human health too.

We're asking questions about what it means for animals is really relevant, I think, right now.

Kousha Navidar: To anyone who lives in New York City, in fact.

Amorina Kingdon: Oh my gosh, yes. I live beside an ambulance route and I'm sure that that's taken a little bit of time off my-- anyways, the other thing that tends to happen is you have to call louder and more often sometimes in order to get your message across. Not to get too esoteric, but there's the whole science of communication and signal design and that sort of thing, which is really fascinating. If you want to send a signal a long way, for instance, it's best if it's lower and it's very simple and it can be repeated. There's all these sorts of things that you can learn about animal signal design.

If you're an animal that's making complex signals that need to be understood at the other end, like the way that we know a lot of marine mammals do, and you have a shipping lane or something like that, that's going to mean that you have to maybe put more effort into calling more often or calling louder. It's going to change your calling behavior. We don't know what that means for an animal. It might eat into your hunting time if you have to spend time running away from ships or naval sonar or something. Animals don't have fridges. They don't have storage. If you want to eat today, you have to hunt today, and so that's a big thing too.

Kousha Navidar: We're talking about the impact on the ecosystem, this systemic impact. What avenues of study does sound open up for scientists who are trying to fill in those gaps in our knowledge that you're describing?

Amorina Kingdon: That's actually really exciting. I found a lot of good reason for optimism in this actually. Thank goodness, which I was happy. What I've found is that a lot of people who are not acousticians or not sound scientists are actually incorporating sound just into their studies of ecosystems, which is really cool. Here in British Columbia, there's people that are studying kelp forests and kelp forest ecology and they're starting to look at how kelp forests can absorb and dampen noise for the animals that live inside them. Coral reef scientists are looking at the study of how sound moves through coral reefs.

Basically, people are starting to include sound as a sort of aspect of the ecosystem that they hadn't looked at before, which is really amazing because that means it brings an even deeper understanding of how sound works with everything else to make an animal's life the way that it is, which is great. Something else that's really interesting too is that in many cases, it's easier and quicker to monitor the sounds of an ecosystem than it is to go out and do a lot of expensive and complicated in-person monitoring. Now that's not to say that it's like a-- it doesn't solve everything. There's some things that you can tell from a sound that you really need somebody to be there and monitoring.

For example, you can tell that a certain species is there, but you can't count how many of that species are there. If you're in a situation where you have limited resources and you need to monitor, say this marine protected area or you want to monitor this wind farm construction site or something, and you don't have the time or the manpower to have an extensive monitoring situation going on, you can record the sounds and monitor the sounds of the ecosystem and learn a remarkable amount from it.

I think there's a lot of applications of sound underwater now that we know how central it is and how critical it is, where it can help us us understand additional aspects of an ecosystem that maybe we just didn't understand before. It can also give us some insight into how we can keep tabs on ecosystems that maybe we never could before, which is fascinating. The last thing I'll say about that is that there are parts of the ocean that we are just starting to poke our nose into, for better or for worse. There's the Arctic. As we all know, climate change is accelerating and sea ice is retreating.

There's every reason to believe that industry is going to be increasing in the Arctic waters, unfortunately, or fortunately. Understanding the soundscapes of the Arctic Ocean before we intrude there, is something that I think is absolutely critical. Another area that we're just starting to look at is the deep sea and prospecting for deep-sea metals-

Kousha Navidar: Oh, Wow.

Amorina Kingdon: -in the Pacific and around the world.

Kousha Navidar: Yes, it's wonderful to see it.

Amorina Kingdon: Using sound as a tool of inquiry here is really useful.

Alison Stewart: That was Kousha Navidar's conversation with Amorina Kingdon, author of Sing Like a Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water.

[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: You and Me]

After a break, we'll hear Kousha's conversation with speechwriter Riley Roberts about commencement speeches and crafting words to inspire. Stick around.