YouSaid · the spoken record

Amorina Kingdon

lines on the record: 46
first: 2024-09-02
most recent: 2024-09-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Can do as much research as we need to make meaningful regulation. There's actually not a lot of regulation anywhere in the world right now about underwater noise. So things like making sure we have something in place before shipping begins in places like the Arctic or”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has implications for animals that you sound to stay together underwater. And then you have listening space. So this is the distance over what you can hear things. So what this all means is that if you're looking at sort of whales and dolphins, you have to know what their hearing range is, what's frequency they're going to be perceiving things in, what bothers them, how close they are, and then you have to sort of draw a whole other framework for fish, for invertebrates, you know, things like coral, squid, octopus, crabs, animals that can they move away, can they not move away? There's evidence now that very, very loud sounds can even cause sort of a concussive impact that may actually kill some plankton. So it gets complicated, but a sort of way to think about it is we need to answer those questions of who hears what, how, and what does it mean. And then we can start to understand how these sounds impact animals.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For example, you know, lobsters right beside seismic air gun or whales right beside a naval sonar that goes off all of a sudden. A little bit further out from that, you have zones of things like temporary hearing loss, so where the noise is disruptive enough that the animal maybe loses hearing for a little bit or changes its behavior really significantly can't contest a runaway. So you have permanent hearing loss, temporary hearing loss, significant behavioral changes, and then you get into the realm of a little bit further from that you have communication space. So this is the sound where you can, the area where you can meaningfully understand someone you're trying to communicate with. So if you think about this, it's more like if you have a shipping lane and you're trying to talk to your friend, you have to be a lot closer to your friend in order to understand each other, even if you can hear each other just to decipher the signal. You have to yell louder and you have to be closer together to communicate meaningfully, which”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They just Yeah, I think a good framework for understanding noise is actually a technical term. So it means an unwanted sound that interferes with a signal. So just by that definition, something can be a noise to one animal and not a noise to another animal. And it depends on the animal's hearing range. It depends on how close they are to the source and it depends on what the sound means to them and what it can interfere with. So a lot of the time what you have is you have this framework of zones of influence. And this is a sort of a quick and dirty way of thinking about how something can impact an animal. If you picture like a bullseye at the very center, you have the noise source and then coming up from that you have different concentric spheres of influence right up close you have things like injury or death. So this is where a sound is loud enough or energetic enough that it will actually injure the animal or potentially definite or cause permanent damage. And this is what happens when you have”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I should say as well that it seems to have leveled out in the past couple decades whether that's because we're actually making bigger ships that make fewer trips. We don't really know. But it's still pretty high.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I know. It's incredible. And, you know, it does lend a lot of speculation and wonder. And I have often had to have to kind of rein myself back and say, well, you know, just because it's beautiful or just because I don't understand it, it doesn't mean that there's some. you know mystical thing happening and and sometimes science like this is a scientific memoir and i did encounter quite a few scientists who were very wary at people you know going off on flights of fancy about oh does it mean they're talking to each other when will we be able to talk to them and and i i'm totally understand that because you know it's it's you can only say we can say but i don't know it's kind of it's just sometimes you just have to be wondered have wonder at something”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of language, I'm sure you're going to get people that are going to write in and say that I've got such an armchair understanding of this. But this is me expressing my amazement at this level of even getting to figure this with song syntax. The order of the sounds does matter, but there's not really any particular information content in it that needs to be transmitted versus a language they're trying to transmit the information in the language. So for me, that says, well, song is just one of those things where the order of the sounds matters and is just really beautiful. And it's interesting to me that animals that do sing, they're the ones that have the syntax and they're using it for song and not for language.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of that to say, even if we don't know exactly what it is that they're making sounds about or what their sounds specifically mean, what we can say is that these hugely important aspects of their life underwater, they do it acoustically, like above the water, we have a lot of biases towards other senses, but underwater sound is how they do it. So whatever they're doing, it's important that they can hear each other to do it. And that's what I think is really fascinating. The other thing that I just love was I didn't actually know what a song was, but the definition of whale song actually borrows really heavily from the definitions that were put forward for bird song. And if you play a humpback whale song sped up and a bird song slowed down, it is extremely difficult to tell them apart. They have a lot of the exact same features. And a lot of that just has to do with song being almost the diametrical opposite.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This brings up the question of culture because culture is broadly defined as sort of, I again, could be anything, but one of the things that I like is the way we do things. Culture is the way we do things. Some people would say, oh, there needs to be, you know, like cathedrals and symphonies or whatever. And then other people would say, no, no, no, it's literally anything. But a lot of scientists kind of tend to fall on the side of whales and dolphins do have a culture. And they define that culture how they hunt, how they eat, who they hang out with, who they mate with. There are structures in those societies and they seem to mediate them with sound, which is amazing.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, you're Joe, you're Jane, right? Like that's another level of understanding me and you and group versus whatever. So I guess all of this to say. What we don't really know, but it's not language, but it's”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Identifiers that we have also found in dolphins and killer whales. So there's definitely more going on than we know. There's probably features of the calls that we just don't, I mean, we can't interview these animals yet. We don't know what they mean when they say it. And meaning is another one of those words that, you know, we could say what that means. What does meaning mean? But what we can kind of find is that when whales and dolphins define themselves as members of a group or as individuals, they do it acoustically. And when it comes to dolphins, they're actually able to also label other individuals. Dolphins will have signature whistles that are unique to them. They develop them over their lifetime and it stays constant and fairly constant. And they can also seem to be able to call other animals by their whistle. So that's a huge leap if you think about it. Like me saying, you know, I'm Amy, I'm Amy, I'm Amy for me to be able to then say,”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are very few animals that seem to be able to do what whales and dolphins seem to be able to do, which is define themselves separate from others with a sound or with any other marker. Dolphins do this. The contact call that you talk about Tuvac learning is an example of this. It's kind of a I'm here, I am this, I am this. And a lot of animals will do this. And it's interesting because sound is such a great medium for a contact call. It goes very, very far. It works in the dark. It works around objects. It's like there's a reason we use sound for communication and for language because it does help keep roots together over distance, acoustics. And a lot of the time with contact calls, whales and dolphins are using them. What's really fascinating about the contact calls in that case is that it seems like there are acoustic features folded into the contact calls that we don't know yet might actually be individual identifiers or group identifiers.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Question is a couple of different scientists pointed out to me that if you look at human language, you can analyze it through this one particular lens of bitrate. So this idea of how many bits of information are being translated or transmitted as a signal from one person to another per second or per minute or whatever. And if you look at marine mammals who make these sounds, you find that even in animals that do have fairly elaborate sounds, the bit rate is low enough that it's very unlikely to be a language. So for example, you know, we're talking, we're saying this many words per minute. We're saying this many sounds per minute. A whale that's communicating with a pulsed call that's even the dialect of its group would still be only producing sounds at a bit rate that is very unlikely to be a language. But that's not to say that that's the way to tell if it's a quote unquote language or not. What we do know about animal communication is that”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh gosh, yeah. But yeah, language is one of those tricky ones because there's so many different definitions of it, but one of the things that I kind of like that makes sense to me is the idea that the order of the words matters. Bring the ball to the hoop is different from bring the hoop to the ball. They mean different things. And so I think when you look at whale sounds and the different classifications that we have of them, there aren't a lot of cases where we've found that the syntax and the order of it matters in a human language kind of way. That's not to say that there aren't whole other constructs and whole other ideas of what they're communicating that we don't have. I mean, language is a human idea. And I'm very much not qualified to talk about that. But one of the things that I also thought was interesting with the language.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I love that you zeroed in on that and talked about that because I spent a lot of time looking up, well, I started with dictionary definitions like any sort of starting point for a journalist is like, okay, well, what does culture mean? I'm sure there's definition of culture that's just that's what it is. And I kind of zeroed in on these three words because I kept hearing them a lot. Song, culture, and language. And I wanted to know what we knew about animals. And I'm not an anthropologist. And I very much kind of didn't want to go too deep into this with, because frankly, I'm just not qualified, but also because it would make the book very different. I did want to focus on what we know about sounds sort of more from a physics and ecological standpoint. But I did want to ask questions about what we know about these definitions. And of course, there are as many definitions of these things as you can possibly find. And there was no simple answer.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the sailboat, and the sailboat kit can't hear them, and you've just got these two completely separate worlds, and I could pull the hydrophone up and put it down like a couple inches and just different worlds. And it just amazed me. And I was just delighted by it.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the look on my face, I was just standing there in the dark with this huge grin on my face. Oh my gosh, I found them. They're real. So it was so delightful to finally be able to hear them humming. And I mean, it was even more remarkable because I was standing in a small community sailboat mooring. There's a resort there. There's a party on the deck. I can hear across this dark water. I can hear like the lapping of water on a dock. I can hear voices. I can hear, you know, and then all of that disappears underwater, just underlining how absolutely cut off these two worlds are acoustically. And then underwater, you can hear is just this massive suffusing of like this humming noise. And it's these fish and they're trying to mate and continue their genes and do their thing. And they can't hear the result.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And every year it would come around, and every year I would fail to find these fish. And finally, finally, finally, last year, I think it was last year. Yes, it was last year. I went out and I had rigged a broom handle with my hydrophone cord. And I went out onto a dock about half an hour north of Victoria where I live. And it was a small community. And I dropped the hide and my broom. Yeah. And I dropped it off the deck and, you know, above the water. It was this quiet night and there are people talking and you couldn't hear anything. And as soon as it blinked into the water, all of a sudden all that vanishes. And I just hear,”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The same time, the females are out in midwater, and they are listening for these males, and their ears have actually hormonally become more sensitive to those harmonics that are going to make it out into the water. And so we know that ears do have hormone receptors in them, human ears become more sensitive to certain things at different times of their lives. But the females have become more sensitive. They've changed from being sensitive to the sound of everyday grunts to the sound, the frequency of these exact harmonics. And so they swim up, they find the biggest male making the strongest noise, and they mate with him. And he then guards the eggs until the baby's hatch. And once you know what this sound is, it sounds like a fog horn. It's very objectively boring, but then you're listening to it and you're like, oh, there's harm, monics in there. And to a female midshipman, it's like a beautiful sound. And so I was like, I got to hear the sound. I got to hear this.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is and he will vibrate. What he's doing is he's vibrating this muscle against the swim bladder like a drum about a hundred times a second. It's one of the fastest muscles in the vertebrate kingdom and he will do this for hours. And it's a show of stamina and strength and he's making this very, very loud sound and it's going out into the water. And two things aside from that being cool, two things are happening as well. One is because the sound is so low, vibrating at 100 times a second which makes it 100 hertz, which is actually a fairly low sound. And a low sound has a very long wavelength, even longer in water, and so that creates a lot of distortion. So the sound itself that he's making shouldn't actually work very well in shallow water because the wavelength shouldn't even really fit. It should reverberate and distort. But what the sound does is it actually creates harmonics. And there's harmonics at 200 hertz, 400 hertz, all that kind of stuff. And then what's happening at...”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did. It did. It's about the size of my hand, or maybe like that big. And basically it's got a big triangular head, a small kind of slimy body, and it lives in the ocean. And every spring, the males, they have this organ called a swim bladder, which is an air-filled sack inside their body that they use to control buoyancy. A lot of fish have a swim bladder. And the muscles beside its swim bladder, the males in the spring, they swell up like crazy. They're just huge muscles. And at the same time, the male will sort of swim up to the tide line very, very almost in the air, and he'll make a nest under a rock. And it has to be a particular type of shoreline kind of muddy with some rocks on it. And he will set up a nest and then at night he will start to hum and this hum is so loud that if in certain circumstances you can hear it above the water. That's how loud it is.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The ocean, and I couldn't, I didn't hear them. And sometimes it was that I couldn't get there late enough because the park closed. Sometimes it was that I had to travel and I was going to be away from that place and I couldn't hear them. I heard a lot of other fish before I heard the plainfin midshipment. So part of it was just at this point I was going to hear the darn plain fin midshipman, but part of it was because there's been so much research done on it that the more and more I learned about what that sound meant, the more it was amazing to me. So the plane fin midshipman, it's like the most uninteresting looking fish I'm not selling this fish anymore. Well, it is”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I set out, first of all, I discovered that above and beyond questions of getting a hydrophone and finding the fish, coastal access is no joke. I mean, if you think about it, it's actually kind of difficult for the average person to go to the ocean shore and just be able to put a hydrophone in it. You have to go to a park usually. And these parks usually close after dark or it's private property. And so this fish happens to call between about 10 and midnight for about a couple of weeks a month. And so every year it would come around and it would be like, all right, it's time to go listen to the midshipmen. And I had scoured scientific papers for locations with GPS coordinates that I knew that these fish were at this location. And I would head out there at like 10.30 p.m. with my hydrophone. And I'm sure people thought they didn't know what to think. I'm tromping through the woods. I was going downtrails. I was parking where I shouldn't have parked, trying to get to.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, well, without that hydrophone, one of the best things I ever bought, my gosh. So I set out and I thought I lived beside the ocean. People have written about this fish. It will be very, very easy for me to go out and listen to this fish. Well.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, part of the reason I wanted to hear the plainfin midshipmen at first it didn't seem like part of it was because it was one of the fish that Kieran and his colleague Xavier Moy were trying to listen to. It's a local fish here in British Columbia, so I thought, oh, this will be easy. And I started, I actually, when I knew that I was going to be doing this book, I went in and bought a little dip hydrophone. Actually, I probably should have brought it over. It's just, it's a cord and it's a little, it looks like a film canister on the end and it's just a little personal. It's almost a starring.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Give credit where credits do. And it's technically true. And so when it came time to write or to title the book rather, one of the things that I really loved about everything I learned was how counterintuitive some of it was. And to me, that idea of birds singing like fish was just the exact kind of thing that you learn when you look closer at some of these phenomena and you just absolutely undercut all of your assumptions. So that's why the title of the book is Sing Lake Fish.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, I can. And full credit to Kieran Cox from the Simon Fraser University for that one. So I actually met, this is the scientist that I spoke to in the first of the book, and I'd actually met him, I guess, almost 10 years ago now on a field trip up on the central coast of British Columbia. And at the time, he was one of the first people that I spoke to who was working on fish sounds. And this was one of those conversations where it's four in the morning, you're tramping through a mud flat, you're wondering why you got into journalism if you were just going to have to get up at four o'clock in the morning and tramp through a mud flat. And I was talking to Kieran and he basically said, yeah, he's working on fish sounds. And I, like most people that at the time were like, fish make sounds, what? And so he enlightened me that he was working on fish sounds. And he kind of...”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Particularly entrancing. Some of them are, I mean, seal sounds and even some fish sounds are beautiful, like aesthetically beautiful and it's easy and inspiring to think about them. But a lot of the sounds that animals make underwater are not really that fascinating unless you know what they're saying, to put it politely. So like I'm fish grunting, unless you know what it's doing. It's just, oh, did that fish just grunt? It's hard to make a grunt sound. Cool. But the more you, I think what I really drew on was my more that I learned about what it meant, the more it became just three-dimensional and amazing for me. And there I go using a visual metaphor for acoustic phenomena because we're so human. We have to do this. We can't just get away from that visual reliance. But yeah, to be honest with you, I just kind of free wrote a lot of stuff and just went with what felt right.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, luckily there are a growing number of databases that you can go to and listen to a lot of these sounds for free. So the Macaulay Library at Cornell University is one, Ocean Networks Canada here in Canada has a SoundCloud and lots of free streaming online, Fish Sounds is an online database. So you can, if you look, you can find recordings of a lot of these things. To be completely honest with you, finding the language just was one of the most joyful parts of writing this book. It really felt intuitive and creative. I just listened to a lot of the sounds and thought of what came up for me. And I was really inspired just to describe them with a free hand. It doesn't happen a lot in science writing that you can put that kind of subjective spin on it. But I just, maybe it's just because I love the sounds themselves. And it's funny because a lot of these sounds are not at first.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These whales, these fish, these shrimp, and all of this, not to mention the capability of listening suddenly comes into the conscious mind. And so if you're wondering why it is that it seems like we're just talking about underwater sound and noise now, a lot of it is because we've scientists have only really started asking questions about this when they started realizing what was there in the last couple decades.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are a few scientists who had time on these naval hydrophones and were able to listen. And he also had some people who were also just noticing outside of this that, yeah, in fact, there are quite a lot of noises in the ocean, notably the rise of aquariums and places like Marine Studios in Florida, where if you're living closer and closer to animals like dolphins, you start to notice they make noise. So people were asking questions to begin with. But those massive repositories of biological sound and biological data were largely kept classified for sometimes 10, 20, 50 years. And what ended up happening is when the Cold War ended and when the secrecy of these networks was compromised, a whole bunch of different things. It's more complicated than that. But to put it very, very simply, sometime around the 1990s, 80s and 90s, these networks were declassified and all of a sudden all this data of these animals”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you hear, of course, wind and rain and waves, but you also hear a huge amount of what they call biologicals. And so they didn't know what the sound was. And if you think about it, if you're listening underwater and you can't see what's making a sound, then you don't know what's making a sound. It's a circular problem. And so what ended up happening is around World War II, some of the very first studies that sort of looked at animals or making sound underwater were naval funded projects, people like Marie Poland Fish and Martin Johnson, who were being sent out basically to figure out what was in the ocean so that they could inform sonar training manuals and listening brochures so that the sonar operators could say, oh, we don't have to worry about that. That's a shrimp. Or, oh, you don't have to worry about that. That's a whale. And you have these massive catalogs of biological noise that no one's ever really listened to or heard before. And it's classified. It's all completely classified.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the drive to come up with directional listening, directional sonar, extending the range, all that kind of thing happened as a direct result of wartime. And then once we came to World War II in the 1940s and the subsequent Cold War, that was when you had all of a sudden people had realized that when you send sound over a very, very long distances in the ocean, which hadn't really happened before because we just hadn't been able to do it, that sound moved and bent in different ways. And so you had these creation of these underwater listening networks. And that was another game changer because what happened was as soon as you start listening underwater passive sonar all over the world.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fessenden, Canadian engineer about two years after the Titanic he patented the first oscillator that was able to actually listen to sounds underwater without hearing things in air. And so then, of course, as you say, then it became about listening for submarines. And that became so important. It was called the submarine problem. And people were, the wartime effort was just absolutely crazy about trying to figure out, or they were really, really trying to figure out how you could listen to submarines. And one of the biggest problems for that was the same problem that I had when I was underwater with my brother, which was underwater, it's really, really hard to tell the direction a sound is coming from. And so if you're an Allied submarine and you're listening underwater, you have to turn your engines off. You have to listen and you'll maybe hear something within a couple of kilometers and you won't know what direction it's from. That was the state of listening underwater at the start of World War I.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that they could come up with the properties and catalog the properties of water like they were trying to catalog the properties of so many other things in the world. And that was pretty much how it went. You had people asking questions that were driven by these larger scientific principles just trying to prove their points. And everything kind of changed from my very limited historical perspective. Everything kind of changed from the Titanic sank, which was in 1912, which was right before the Great War, World War I. So in 1912, right before World War I, you suddenly have this huge disaster, this huge nautical disaster, and you also at the same time have a rise of merchant shipping and shipping in general around coasts, and you really have this rise in a need to have accurate navigation. And so you have the development of hydrophones and the development of listening, and you really have the first development of the ability to listen underwater and get hydrophones. And that was a game changer. And that was done by people like Rich.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As to whether or not certain animals could, in fact, hear underwater. And the reason it was important was because, as the biologist Carl von Frisch wrote, there's a principle involved, right? They're trying to determine is the ear the only way to hear. And how do animals fit together in this tree of life that we're trying to determine scientifically as opposed to simply, you know, looking at it, as Aristotle did and saying this is just the way it is. So from the biology perspective, there was sort of this hanging question of whether or not it was possible to hear without an ear. And then from the physics side of things, people started listening underwater not because they were curious what sounds were there, but because they were trying to determine mathematically the density of water and measuring the speed of sound underwater was the quickest way to do that. And so you had these gentleman scientists out on Lake Geneva with gunshots and bells and all these elaborate things. And they were just trying to measure the speed of sound.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“they thought, but they were they knew that they heard, and even Leonardo da Vinci knew that sound worked underwater, Francis Bacon knew that sound worked underwater. And what kind of change there was in the scientific revolution? There was this sort of new focus on using observation and data to answer questions as opposed to just listening to what somebody like Aristotle said. And you had this kind of new avenue of inquiry. And this happened in both biology and in physics. In biology, it was instead of looking at an animal's behavior, you looked at its anatomy deduced from its anatomy, what it could do. And so you had these anatomists who looked deeper into animals like fish, discovered that they didn't seem to have a cochlea or an inner ear as we would understand it, and avowed. Fish cannot hear. They do not have ears. So therefore, whatever you think you see them doing, it's not that. And it became this huge debate for quite a while in biology.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was the humans listening underwater definitely had some very strange things that drove it. And it's worth noting that even back as far as Aristotle, we wrote about animals that made sound and heard sound underwater. Aristotle wrote about fish hearing underwater, Pliny the Elder in Roman times wrote about fish being able to detect sound. And all of this came about from what might be termed, and I'm sure a biologist would probably maybe correct me here, but a behaviorist perspective. So you're looking at the world and you're seeing an animal react a certain way or do a certain thing. And you're saying, okay, well, then it does X, Y, Z. And that was a sort of the worldview, the sort of Aristotelian received wisdom from on high kind of thing for many, many years. And that worldview was perfectly happy saying that animals heard, although they didn't have ears, obviously, because you can't see a fish's ears. That's what”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was this video that had been created where they were actually able to visualize this movement. And they were able to do it in a tank where they were creating waves and pressure waves that sloshed back and forth and waves that kind of summed and it's very hard to describe, but essentially what they were doing was they were creating different sounds with this tank and then visualizing the fish ear actually moving as it perceived it. And that was the first time that I realized that there were more ways to hear or perceive sound than with a human ear. And so I started to think, oh, wait a minute. So if there's a hair cell and there's water movement, you could perceive a sound. And so I guess those two things really just kind of expanded my thinking about what sound could be in especially sound underwater.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saw a video of a very, very close microscopic picture of a fish's ear while it was perceiving a sound. And what was happening during this was a tiny stone inside fish ears called an odolith. And the way that the fish gets a sound is it moves back and forth over a bed of what are called sensory hair cells.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A harm per se, but it just changed a dynamic. It changed an ecosystem dynamic. And that really stuck me because all of a sudden there was this whole other level of impact that something could have, that we wouldn't see unless we were really looking closely. And basically what happened was when there was motorboat noise, the RAS tried to cheat more. They would try to take more bites of the bigger fish and then the bigger fish would chase them more often. And I just imagine like, you know, an impact on a human. I'm going about my day, but I'm just a little bit more annoyed. And what does that mean for my life? And what does that mean for my day? And that was a big one because I started to realize that what we think of intuitively as an impact is a very narrow center of a much bigger sphere. And then the other thing that happened was I saw a video, and this is going to sound maybe a little bit obscure, but I just, it was so incredible.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were actually two things that happened that really kind of had an aha moment. One of them was I got assigned a story when I was working at Hat Guy about how motorboat noise changed the interaction between cleaner RAS and their client fish. And for those of you who don't know, cleaner Rass are kind of fish. They live on some coral reefs. And they're small, but rather they make a deal with bigger fish. It's like a symbiotic relationship. They set up a station and the bigger fish come by and the cleaner rests will clean them. And in exchange, the bigger fish won't eat them. And so they eat parasites and dirt off the bigger fish. And normally when you think of a harm, like in environmental journalism, which I've been doing at that point for quite a while, you think a harm is something that hurts or kills an animal, right? Like you think about an oil spill or a ship strike and it's intuitive. But here we had this weird impact that was”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At all my own or his, and then other sounds like if a motorboat went by, the sound could pitch kind of seem different. So it was just kind of confusing, and I think a lot of people have that if, you know, for us it was a lake and for other people it might be a swimming pool or a bathtub or something. But yeah, I think that we just think, oh, if we can't hear something, there's nothing to hear.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm sure it was very important to the game of trucks. And I could hear myself, and he couldn't hear me. And then he turned to me and he tries to yell. And all I can see is like this stream of bubbles and this very faint, tinny little. And so, of course, the first thing we do is we start yelling bad words at each other because we can do that underwater and we won't be caught. I remember that it seemed like sound didn't really work. And at the time, all I thought was, well, we can't plug trucks down here because there's no sound. But looking back on it through the lens of this book, actually, I realized that that wasn't strictly true. There were some sounds that did come through. If I was holding something like two rocks or my truck and I was banging something together, I could kind of hear that. But sound didn't really seem to come from one spot. I couldn't locate the sound. I had trouble sort of localizing where a sound came from. I couldn't hear voices.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, thank you for suggesting that the book has a sense of wonder that was a real important thing for me to convey, and I'm glad that it came across. And it's definitely what drove my initial questions and definitely kept me going. So I think a lot of people have this experience for me. It was my brother and I were very avid Tonka truck players when we were children. We had a very extensive road system and, you know, make-believe world when we were kids. And one of the things that we did one day was we live beside a lake and we took our trucks and we just kind of threw them into the lake because we were kids and it was summer and we were a little bit bored. And so we started driving our trucks around underwater and maybe six feet of water. And we tried to talk to each other. And so we were there we are underwater. And as you know, you can't really see that clearly. And I remember going underwater taking a big deep breath and going under and yelling at my brother something.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Intelligence Squared where great minds meet. I'm head of programming, Connor Boyle, on the podcast today, The World of Underwater Sound, What Noises are Our Oceans Making and What Do They Mean. It's the topic of journalist Amarina Kingdom's recent book, Sing Like Fish. The book is the culmination of Amarina's work exploring how marine animals use sound to survive and the ways humans are impacting critical underwater soundscapes. Joining her to discuss it is my Thilly Route. The journalist, audio producer, and book critic. Let's join Mythilly now with more.”
2024-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · A Deep Dive into the Sounds of the Seas, with Amorina Kingdon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT