Sounds of the Sea
Speaker 1: 00:00 When you listen to the ocean, you realize there's a whole world of sound that our ears aren't made to hear on this episode of rad scientist, sounds of the sea host Margo wall introduces us to Goldie Phillips, a postdoctoral scholar at the Scripps institution of oceanography. She studies whale calls to understand how populations of endangered species like the blue and fin whales are fairing born in Trinidad and Tobago. Phillips always knew she wanted to study the creatures in the water that surrounded her Island nation. Speaker 2: 00:42 I'm hoping that we can hear a Marine mammal while recording in the surf. But what we hear sounds more like this. It's like, [inaudible] like the wave by script's pier. The water is so shallow that all we hear are waves and bubbles. When you get further off shore and deeper, you start to capture a soundscape rich with aquatic life. The sounds can tell you a lot about Marine mammals, their lifestyle, their population size, their modes of communication. These are the things that Goldie wants to know because she has been in love with the water and the creatures within it for as long as she can remember, she grew up around water in Trinidad and Tobago. So my country being Speaker 3: 01:31 Caribbean Island, um, I was always, I always, I grew up always being fascinated with the ocean. I was like, okay, I want to be a Marine biologist, but I know a lot of people say they want to be Marine biologist when they're like in high school. And then they get to like college and like, no, that's not going to work. But I kind of like, I was really determined to be a Marine biologist, Speaker 2: 01:48 But not everyone understood her life plan, brain biology. Isn't a very common career in Trinidad and Tobago. And when she told her parents that she wanted to study Marine mammals for her PhD at Duke, Speaker 3: 02:02 And I go, well, my dad wanted me to, I'm like the first person in my family to go to college. And I'm the only person in my family to get a PhD. So my father wanted me, like, I guess he put like all his hopes on me. And he wants me to be like a medical doctor or like a lawyer, because that was the thing to do. Um, so he didn't, he wasn't very accepting of it. Um, I think it was only when I got the Fulbright scholarship and I was the only one from my country to get this, this particular kind of scholarship. It was like three years of science and technology. It was when he, when that happened and I was like, okay, dad, I'm leaving. Bye. I'm not going to do my PhD. And he was like, Oh, okay. Like, I think that's when he started to kind of come around and he's like, Oh, this just like really cool. You know? So that was kind of nice. Speaker 2: 02:51 Goldie starts doing internships, studying Marine biology. It's at the end of one of these internships when she figures out what she wants do with her graduate studies. She's in The Bahamas. When she sees a pot of spotted dolphins, they look like bottlenose dolphins, but with tiny specks of white and gray on their backs, but Goldie notices something else about these sea creatures. Speaker 3: 03:15 I saw like futon time, like the dorsal fin is on mango because of some strike. Speaker 2: 03:21 It's one thing to hear about how we negatively impact wildlife. And another thing to see it in person Goldie knew she wanted to have a positive impact Speaker 3: 03:31 Pact. That was a real eye opening experience to me because that was when I really understood fully like home, uh, negatively humans, um, could be impacting Marine mammals. We are causing, you know, we are training the, you know, lives of like these animals. We are like, you know, destroying their habitats. And I think that we also have the responsibility to do something about it. And that was when I decided that I wanted to do something in conservation. Speaker 2: 04:00 She does her part by tracking the populations of the two largest mammals on the planet. Speaker 3: 04:06 So the two species that I'm working on, um, uh, the blue wheels and the fin wheels, both of them are endangered species. So those are the ones that, you know, have the most to lose. So that's why I'm focusing on those Speaker 2: 04:19 Blue and fin whales were very popular with whale hunters because of their size. Their meat was eaten and their blubber was rendered into oil. Well, hunting was outlawed in the seventies and eighties, but by then, their populations were decimated. It will take years to recover. These whales only reach sexual maturity around seven years of age. And their gestation is even longer than ours at around 11 months. They give birth to one calf at a time and then wait a few years until the next you can imagine how important it is to keep track of these species that are so endangered. And you think that the two largest mammal species would be easy to track, but the ocean is a big place. So you want a signal that says whale here that travels very far like, Speaker 4: 05:11 Yes, Speaker 2: 05:16 That's the call of a blue whale sped up 10 times. They make sounds to communicate with each other and search for food. And Goldie eats drops on the ocean. Listening for these whale sounds when she hears this call, Speaker 2: 05:34 She knows it's a fin whale. So how does Goldie eavesdrop on the ocean? As I found out earlier, just dropping a hydrophone off the shore, isn't going to yield much success for counting whales. So Goldie makes recordings off the ocean with heavy devices deployed on the sea floor in different locations around the Pacific Goldie and deploy and collect these devices every once in a while. And I asked to tag along next time, goalie goes out to sea. She said she won't be collecting her devices for a while, but she invites me on a trip with a colleague who studies creatures less glamorous than whales. Fish Speaker 1: 06:16 Was an excerpt from the rad scientist episode. Sounds of the sea. If you want to hear more about Goldie's work, all you need to do is search for rad scientist in your favorite podcast app, or go to kpbs.org/rad scientist.
