I almost deleted that email. It was such a weird, spammy address, something like 17N151W@panthalassa.net, but the seminar it was advertising caught my eye: “Using artificial intelligence to assess noise pollution and acoustical niches in the deep sea.” It was an odd venue I’d never heard of, but it was close to the beach and it didn’t take much to lure me away from campus to somewhere I could stare out at the watery horizon, even if the talk sucked.
The seminar was fascinating, as was the speaker. She was a striking Polynesian woman wearing something that some might argue could have been construed as somewhat unprofessional in terms of being kind of revealing. Personally, I was fine with it. She had used some kind of neural net software to analyze sounds recorded using the US Navy’s deep-sea recording network, mostly used to detect enemy submarines, but now sometimes made available to researchers studying underwater acoustics. Back in WWII they discovered they could send low frequencies thousands of miles along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the water conditions reflect the sound waves into an effective deep sound channel. In theory, a downed pilot could set off an explosive charge in this channel and distant listening stations could triangulate his position and stage a rescue. Whales also use this low frequency approach to communicate over huge distances. But just like the sounds of birds and insects in a healthy forest, the ocean environment is crowded with sounds across the whole spectrum, from whale groans to dolphin squeaks to the chattering of shrimp. And now, add to this symphony the dull roar of myriad fleets of container ships, endlessly crossing the oceans connecting the empires of China and Walmart, along with oil tankers, cruise ships, etc. Then throw in the occasional shock wave from oil exploration ships doing seismic surveys with air guns, plus a few lethal sonic blasts from military SONAR. That’s your modern marine acoustic environment. Sorting it all out can be a mess. Dr. Kaiakea Alana had developed a neural net/machine-learning/fuzzy-logic/whatever program that could sort different waveforms into bins, some of which represented species. She overlaid onto this mosaic of acoustic niches the jarring sonic intrusions of human activity. Some sounds kill outright. But the more subtle toxic sounds disorient, disrupting communication, leading whales astray to beach themselves. In urban environments, birds change their songs to fit in with the crowded, competitive sound landscape. Will marine life be able to adapt to sonic attack? Her final message was at once inspiring and sad: if we just listen carefully, the complexity of the marine environment is revealed to us. But we need to shut the fuck up.
Her algorithm had been able, with decent confidence, to attribute some sounds to certain species, such as various baleen whales, but I noticed that there were some unidentified “bins” that included consistent sound signatures without a clear assignment to a known species. I had to ask about these in the question-answer period.
“I notice you have several unidentified bins. How do you interpret those?”
“Well, they could be previously undescribed modes of known species, new species, classified military sea craft or SONAR experiments, or some unpredicted artifact of the complex acoustic environment of the abyssal zone. Probably the latter. The sonic environment is so rich that it’s hard to filter out all the noise with complete confidence. However, statistically, the bins I presented here appear to be non-random sounds produced reproducibly in the environment, either biotically or abiotically. So short answer, I don’t know.”
Hmmm. Intriguing. I had been so focused on DNA I hadn’t even considered sound. But sound was the preferred medium of the deep sea. Light doesn’t travel well in turbid waters (though tell this to the show-off squids with all their chromatophores). Sure, maybe my beloved Abyssal Ganglia was linked through myoelectric impulses and stored Alexandria Libraries full of cultural knowledge in DNA, but what about sound? Sound carries great distances underwater and moves way faster than in air. Could separate nodes exchange information efficiently by bursts of high bandwidth vibrations? Is this more robust, more secure than electrochemical propagation through axon-like filaments of microbial tentacles? Or maybe, they just like to sing?
But her methodology was perfectly aligned for detecting a new intelligence in the abyssal zone. I had to approach her and see if she could somehow be recruited, or if I could at least steal her ideas. I waited for the break, and politely made my way through the predominately male crowd that gravitated toward her.
“That was a wonderful talk, thank you so much. I’ve just recently become interested in this topic and I don’t know much about it. I was really intrigued by the potential of your technique to detect new forms of communication. Do you think there might be sound generating creatures we know nothing about down there?”
Her eyes could have reasonably been described as oceanic and limitless. “Oh, yes, I’m certain there are things we know nothing about ‘down there.’”
I struggled to maintain eye contact, keeping my eyes at a high altitude. It was only partly her low-cut top that made this difficult. The immeasurable depth of her eyes was also disconcerting. “Right, the abyssal zone is like half the planet. But it sounds like sound is a great way to explore it. I wonder, you’ve managed to sort out all these complex patterns into different bins, maybe different species. Is there any hope of figuring out information content from these data?”
“Well, some signals are quite repetitive, like mating calls of some fish species. So those aren’t very information-rich.”
“Right, they are probably mostly saying ‘Hey Baby, check me out.’”
“Yes, that, though maybe also some information on their size, age and gender. Cetaceans, on the other hand, seem to report all sorts of things about their environment. By listening to each other baleen whales know the position of their pod relative to major landmarks along their migratory route, like seamounts, bays, etc., so their speech changes with their location. Whereas dolphins and orcas seem to communicate in higher frequencies: clicks, whistles, chirps, and possibly “sono-pictures,” literal representations of their immediate environment. For example, their word for ‘flowerpot’ would be a sonic picture of a flower pot.”
“That comes up in dolphin conversation much?”
“It was a recent study I saw. They visualized dolphin sono-pictures for various test objects using a device they called a CymaScope. One of them was a flowerpot. Though to be honest, you really had to squint to see anything resembling a flowerpot.”
I shook my head in wonder. “Your sound clips were amazing. It sounded like the ocean speaking. So, uh, have you learned the language of Gaia?”
She became serious and solemn. “When Gaia speaks, her meaning is clear.” She spoke with enough gravity that (paradoxically) several male satellites started to leave her orbit (yes, that’s the simile I’m sticking with. Dammit, Jim, I’m a scientist, not a poet). I might have written her off as crazy, too, but she was a genius with signal processing, and I suspected that her madness might be compatible with my own.
The dissipating crowd allowed me to be a little more candid. I smiled, “Absolutely. I’d love to hear Gaia speak. It’s just that all the good feedbacks take decades, centuries, millennia, and we’re messing things up by the minute.”
She nodded. I continued to babble.
“I am working on something very similar to your project, but in the sphere of DNA. I am looking for patterns in the cacophony of metagenomic data. I believe there is life in the deep ocean that we have not recognized because it is so different from us, so alien, that we have not recognized it. And I think it may be Big and Important. It occurs to me that the approaches you are using to analyze the acoustic environment might be a perfect complement to my work. I have a bit of funding from a private donor to pursue this. If you are interested in collaborating, maybe we could talk?”
She smiled inscrutably, reached into her bag and handed me a business card, before she was once again swallowed by a wave of polite conversation, coffee and cookies.