Bioacoustics

The Whale's Picnic by TekKiah Last week I was lucky enough to go to Maui and help out a fellow researcher*, Dr. James Darling. Jim researches humpback whale song - in fact, he was one of ...

http://bioacoustics.blogspot.com/2013/04/whale-research-aint-no-picnic-required.html

In December, I took (and passed - phew!) my oral comprehensive exams.  I thought it might be useful to other students to write down some tips for things that were helpful while studying for ...

http://bioacoustics.blogspot.com/2013/02/for-those-about-to-comp-we-salute-you.html

Kids watch the moon landing. Child pretending to be an astronaut. On July 20, 1969, thousands of people throughout the world stopped everything to watch something on TV. During my lifet...

http://bioacoustics.blogspot.com/2013/01/from-ships-to-stars-and-back-again.html

Let's say you're a marine biologist, and you've recorded a bunch of whales and dolphins, and you want to study the sounds that they're making.  Some of the cetacean species you've recorded will ...

http://bioacoustics.blogspot.com/2012/10/making-square-out-of-circles.html

When we're thinking about how loud a noise needs to be to damage a whale's hearing, it's important to consider how loud the sounds are that the whale makes itself. If a singing whale makes a sou...

http://bioacoustics.blogspot.com/2012/09/how-loud-is-that-whale-anyway.html

One of the biggest, and most common, mistakes that people make when writing about underwater acoustics is making direct comparisons between the loudness of things in water and in air.  Here's an...

http://bioacoustics.blogspot.com/2012/09/why-cant-we-directly-compare-sounds-in.html

I am only studying chapter 1.2.1 of my big scary bioacoustics book, and already I'm running into some scary maths (tm). However, my advisor has told me that I don't have to actually know how to d...

http://bioacoustics.blogspot.com/2012/09/a-wave-is-complicated-thing-to-equate.html

Surfers know etiquette is important - Don't drop in! Webster's dictionary defines a waterman as  "a person who makes his living from the water." The first time I ran across the term "water...

http://bioacoustics.blogspot.com/2012/08/rules-to-follow-if-you-want-to-be.html

Many people are curious about what it is like to be out on a boat looking for dolphins in Hawaii. Lots of people think it's easy - my job is simply to sit on a boat and watch dolphins. Many peopl...

http://bioacoustics.blogspot.com/2012/08/what-is-looking-for-dolphins-in-ocean.html

*Mostly  **Some of the time Last weekend I was lucky enough to speak at a math workshop for high school teachers put on by some of the University of Hawaii Match Department faculty.  And let...

http://bioacoustics.blogspot.com/2012/06/what-you-know-about-difference-in.html

When I look back at my educational career, it's really striking how poor of a student I was.  That is, I was a pretty mediocre student in the "hard" sciences until I took Marine Biology class ...

http://bioacoustics.blogspot.com/2012/05/we-should-have-studied-dolphins-in-high.html

Art by Casey Roberts Two weeks ago I wrote about how sound gets from a whale, and into your computer .  At the end of that post, I included a pretty rainbow-colored picture of some dolphi...

http://bioacoustics.blogspot.com/2012/03/turning-whalesong-into-rainbows-1000.html

It is unclear if these people have a permit, but their lack of clothing is very clear Whale song - almost everyone's heard it somewhere.  It's especially prevalent on new-age CDs, usu...

http://bioacoustics.blogspot.com/2012/02/magic-crystals-and-whale-song.html

Twice a month, I sail on a shipping tug from Honolulu to either Kauai or the Big Island. On the way, I collect acoustic and GPS data on whales and dolphins. For those of you who haven't spent the...

http://bioacoustics.blogspot.com/2012/02/honolulu-to-kauai-in-one-minute.html

When you or I breathe helium at a birthday party, we get fun, squeaky munchkin voices. That's pretty fun, but what would happen if you gave helium to a dolphin? Cetacean scientists have done jus...

http://bioacoustics.blogspot.com/2012/02/dolphins-on-helium.html