Common dolphins off Co Mayo. Image: Joanne O'Brien
“We’re putting equipment in the water, listening and then starting to piece together a puzzle.” Hear all about Dr Joanne O’Brien’s research on marine mammals and their noisy environments.
Joanne O’Brien has always had a passion for the sea. “I grew up by the sea, so I was always either in it or on it,” she tells SiliconRepublic.com. Unlike many of her peers in secondary school, she knew what she wanted to do when she grew up – marine science.
O’Brien is now a lecturer in marine ecology and bioacoustics at Atlantic Technological University (ATU).
Bioacoustics is the study of the production, transmission and reception of animal sounds. The technology to monitor sound is improving all the time. O’Brien says they can leave devices in place for months at a time, whether on land or underwater. “We put a device out and we leave it there and walk away. So, we’re not having any impact on the animals. We’re not disturbing them and we’re not creating sound.
“It’s a really unique way to monitor,” she says, because you can get information about the animals and their environment, even at times when visual monitoring would not be possible, such as at night or during storms. “It’s a really useful method and it has been shown to be successful across a whole range of species.”
Hear for marine mammals
O’Brien is particularly interested in marine mammals. She and her colleague at ATU, Dr María Pérez Tadeo, are working on a large project to track marine species across Europe. The Strategic Infrastructure for Improved Animal Tracking in European Seas (Straits) project is a consortium of 10 partners led by the Loughs Agency in Northern Ireland. ATU is responsible for monitoring marine mammals and the soundscape at various sites across Europe.
They currently have monitoring devices deployed off the north coast of Ireland, Denmark, Turkey and the straits of Gibraltar, with more planned. They leave the devices in place for up to 12 months at a time, gathering huge amounts of data.
Humpback whale breaching off Co Waterford. Image: Joanne O’Brien
By analysing this data, they can start to answer questions and identify trends about the area under study, including what species are there and for how long? When are species most active? What is the ambient sound level in the area? Is the noise level increasing or decreasing over time? Is the noise level affecting how many whales and dolphins are in the area?
“We’re putting equipment in the water, listening and then starting to piece together a puzzle as to what’s going on there,” O’Brien says.
The noise of offshore wind
This type of monitoring is becoming increasingly important because of the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies.
For many countries, including Ireland, a major part of the transition is offshore wind. The installation and running of these farms will inevitably affect the marine environment in numerous ways. Dr Damien Haberlin studies the impact of wind farms and other artificial structures on shark and ray species. Speaking to SiliconRepublic.com, he argued that it is important to study the affect of offshore developments to minimise their environmental impacts. “I am hopeful our research can inform evidence-based designation of marine protected areas,” he said.
Offshore wind farms create noise disturbances in the marine environment. O’Brien explains the two types of noise pollution: continuous noise (she cites shipping as a big contributor in this regard) and impulsive noise (for example, offshore oil and gas exploration and pile-driving during the installation of wind farms). Isla Graham notes that marine mammals are particularly vulnerable to these loud artificial noises because sound travels so efficiently in water. “Pile-driving can deafen, injure or even kill marine mammals at close range.”
O’Brien says that monitoring of these areas is “extremely important if we’re going to develop [offshore wind] in a sustainable way”. Like Haberlin, she says we need to be proactive about designating marine protected areas. “It’s important that we have these datasets in place so that we’re able to make informed decisions [during] the planning process,” she says.
Marine protected areas are designated areas of water that are free from people, pollution and industrial fishing that can become safe havens for marine ecosystems to regenerate and flourish. In accordance with the EU Biodiversity Strategy, the Irish Government has committed to protecting 30pc of Irish seas by 2030. According to Fair Seas, just 9.4pc of Irish waters are designated as protected currently, but they argue even these areas “are not effectively managed to ensure their conservation objectives are being met”.
Fair Seas is calling on the Government to publish the Marine Protected Areas Bill, which was expected in 2023 but it yet to be progressed.
O’Brien says that it’s important to draw upon any protections for the marine environment as soon as possible, “especially as we start to move into this new era of offshore development”.
Unfortunately, in terms of using research to inform these developments, scientists do not have time on their side. O’Brien says to truly understand what’s happening in an area, you need to monitor it long term. One of the reasons for selecting the north coast of Ireland for the Straits project was that a previous study had monitored the area. “We understand now how important those long-term datasets are.”
O’Brien says this dataset will be “extremely powerful going forward” because it allows them to identify trends over years; particularly, they can analyse the effects of climate change on the marine environment.
Climate on your mind
Climate change is something O’Brien and her colleagues think about and talk about a lot. “Sometimes I think having an ecological education is kind of a bad thing in a way, because you’re so aware of [climate change] and you can’t escape it.”
However, O’Brien is practical in her outlook. She sees it as an obligation to identify issues to inform policymakers and to inspire and educate young students who can also work towards protecting the planet through biodiversity monitoring and conservation efforts.
An example of the value of this kind of work is the recent resurgence of the Irish corncrake population. O’Brien’s PhD student Andrea Parisi used acoustic devices to monitor corncrakes and assess how effective different measures to protect them have been. This work was carried out under the EU Corncrake Life Project led by the National Parks and Wildlife Service. Just last week, it was announced that corncrake territories in core breeding areas have increased by 45pc since 2018.
“It’s very doom and gloom for a lot of the time,” O’Brien says. “But, you know, then you go to sea for a day and you have a fantastic encounter with a group of common dolphins and it just picks you up again.”
ATU students getting ready to survey for marine mammals off west Kerry. Image: Joanne O’Brien
Speaking of getting out to sea, O’Brien is off on an exciting expedition in October with the Celtic Explorer as part of a large multidisciplinary survey which will gather various data from Spain to Ireland.
Dolphins with an Irish accent
With all this data to analyse, O’Brien says they are working with computer scientists to develop machine learning algorithms to process the information automatically.
The current software that O’Brien uses can identify different whale species but not different dolphin species because their whistles sound so similar and are across the same frequency bands. This means that an expert must analyse the data, and they need visual observations to confirm the species.
This is where O’Brien expects advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning will be able to help, by automating this detection process. This could have implications for designating protected areas. Bottlenose dolphins are a protected species meaning they would be a “qualifying interest” for designating a special area of conservation. “These tools and technologies over the next number of years are really going to allow us to take conservation measures to a different level,” O’Brien says.
The potential of this technology for deepening our understanding of how marine mammals communicate is also an exciting prospect. Recent research has posited that sperm whales’ clicks constitute a form of language that humans may be able to replicate using AI.
Bottlenose dolphins in the Shannon Estuary. Image: Joanne O’Brien
A few years ago, work was carried out to analyse the whistles of bottlenose dolphins in the Shannon Estuary and in Cardigan Bay in Scotland. It was found that the dolphins used many of the same whistles but also used whistles that were unique to each place. O’Brien says this was the first indication of different dialects noted for dolphins in Irish waters. She would love to develop this work further with long-term studies and the tech to simplify the analysis.
“I just think it’s fascinating that these animals could have these layers of communication that we’re not aware of.”
Find out how emerging tech trends are transforming tomorrow with our new podcast, Future Human: The Series. Listen now on Spotify, on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
