These recordings from South Eastern Florida capture various aquatic soundscapes along coastal regions both on and offshore. The sounds of snapping shrimp, Atlantic Grunt, boat motors, waves, and more are featured on the natural version of every recording, and some recordings have been edited to highlight various features.
Underwater soundscapes often take a backseat to their above air counterparts when it comes to research and understanding, due predominantly to the more indirect effect on humans. However these aquatic acoustic environments are just as susceptible to noise pollution, and do play a role in the organismal ecology of the marine environment, affecting everything from snapping shrimp to dolphins. As humans alter this environment through various means, it is important for us to understand how these soundscapes function, and how human sound interacts with them.
The presence of anthropophonic sound is clear in these recordings, and can be heard drowning out other natural sounds. Using Audacity sound editing software it is possible to use equalization and amplification modifications to edit the amount of boat motor noise captured and isolate individual sounds. However underwater boat motors do have a wide range of frequencies, concentrated in the highs but still present in the bases, emphasizing the expanse of their impact on the sonic environment. Observations are made on how biophonic, geophonic, and anthropophonic sounds interact with each other in the recordings.
Noise pollution in aquatic environments is an understudied and therefore under-regulated medium. While noise pollution activism and legislation have been progressing above air, not much has been done underwater, due to the main effect of us as humans not experiencing it. Many many marine organisms rely on sonic adaptations for communication, orientation and even predation, from the commonly known whales and dolphins all the way down to the shrimp you heard earlier. Vision is a difficult medium to rely on underwater, especially in churned up or murky areas, so auditory cues play a major role; in looking at a side by side clip of above air and underwater recordings of the same area at the same time, it turns out that, in certain areas at least, the underwater sound-scape is more active. Understanding the extent to which noise pollution affects these fragile ecosystems is key to providing another layer of protection. The current level of “safe” sound in the ocean, determined by the Navy, is anything below 180 decibels. To put that into perspective, standing 100 feet from a jet engine is only 140 decibels and OSHA mandates the maximum exposure for anyone at just 115 decibels to be limited to 15 minutes. Note also that decibels are a logarithmic unit–therefore an increase in 40 dB means that the sound is actually 10,000 times stronger.
The sonic map created by this project is far from complete. While we attempt to use these field recordings to draw some conclusions about the nature of sound underwater, there are a vast amount of still uncollected data. Additionally since any sound recording is merely a snapshot, the observations of the same locations at different times, and over the span of time would be beneficial in comparison.
The collections in this gallery come from off the southeast coast of Florida, specifically Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties. The samples were collected off a fishing boat at various times of the day in early March, in various saltwater locations.
Above-air noise is beginning to be regulated due to expansive studies upon the effects of noise pollution. Water noise regulations however are in a much more infant state, partially due to the lack of data involved. This project’s sonic gallery offers and encourages more entries from a greater span of time and space comparison. Other projects, such as SAPPHIRE have made significant groundwork on the effects of boat noise on dolphins, and establishing an aquatic sonic ecology baseline to use for future comparison.