eBird
June 6th, 2022
Via Verge, an article on eBird, a social network that connects people to each other and also with birds:
It was a beach date that would transform Chris Michaud, though the memorable parts were neither the beach nor the date but what he saw that day. Both in their early 30s, summer of 2017, Chris had met Gemma recently, swiping on Bumble. They decided to head to the New Hampshire coast, not far from where they both lived in Portsmouth. Before arriving at the beach, Gemma suggested they do a little birding.
In a marsh, they spotted egrets, a glossy ibis, and “some other cool stuff.” Later, they went to the beach, as promised, but Chris just kept thinking about the birds. This moment, in birding lingo, is called the “spark,” when a person sees something that inspires them to be a birder for life. (Nearly everyone I talked to for this story had a spark and volunteered their story whether I asked for it or not.)
Since then, Chris has been an avid birder and, like many avid birders, is a frequent user of an app called eBird. Naturally, bird watching today involves going out into the world, encountering something wonderful, strange, perhaps even profound or moving, and then logging it on your phone.
Along with Merlin, which helps people identify species of birds, eBird lets people keep track of the ones they’ve seen and, in doing so, become part of a crowdsourced, citizen-science mission. Whether users care or not, the millions of birds being observed tell scientists about huge patterns in climate change.
For Chris, though, using eBird is about the thrill of adding every new species he encounters. When we first speak, he immediately summons the exact number of different birds he’d seen: “315 species — pretty cool, right?”
Though Gemma was studying birds professionally as an ornithologist, it was Chris who became the bigger birding hobbyist. When they went together, Chris would be quick to suggest a bird was rare. Gemma tended to make safer guesses, to assume what was more likely. Chris understood — but what if? It was the personality divide you might expect between a woman of science and a man who works in marketing.
The reality, for Chris, was that getting into birds was a confluence of many things. There was the budding relationship, the struggle to get sober, that relationship fracturing, and, then, the cancer.
Alcoholism, breakups, even lymphoma — sad as they are, these are things that happen to lots of people. But not everyone got to see what Chris did because, eventually, he bore witness to a rare bird — an appearance so exceptional that everyone I asked would agree that, if you were very lucky, it was something you got to witness once in a lifetime. A once-in-a-lifetime bird!
For Chris, birding was existential, maybe even lifesaving. And it could be for the rest of us too, whether we know it or not. Anomalous, unusual sightings are thrilling to birders, but it’s the sum of all their everyday, boring observations that tell us the most about the world we live in, and how we might save it.
To experience nature is to delight in it. To reckon with nature is to understand that we’re dealing with an unfathomable amount of loss.
A 2019 study published in Science discovered that in North America, nearly 3 billion birds have vanished. The staggering decline of bird populations over the past 50 years is the result of “human-altered landscapes” and “an indicator of a coming collapse of the overall environment.” You know, climate change.
The data that eBird collects is obviously useful in the field of ornithology. But its more urgent application, according to Chris Wood, director of eBird, is comprehending our dying planet. “Birds as indicators of natural systems overall,” he explains. Any data that is spatial and temporal is useful for climate scientists. But birds especially, because of their susceptibility to minor temperature fluctuations, can be more reliable signals of change. He apologizes for the cliché, then evokes the notion of a canary in a coal mine. To me, the metaphor says less about birds but more powerfully suggests that we all live in a coal mine.
Who am I? What am I doing? What is interesting to me? What do I care about?
When I speak with Wood, who is also the managing director for the Center for Avian Population Studies, he has recently absconded to Tampa for the winter. He’s been working on eBird ever since it started as an informal grant from the National Science Foundation. This month marks 20 years since eBird launched originally as a website. As a tool of mass data collection, the two decades of eBird development have paralleled the tech sector’s shift from statistical analysis to artificial intelligence. (You can chart that change in buzz words — from “AI” to ”big data” to “machine learning” and back to “AI.”)
Climate change is a systems problem, and the prevailing attitude among scientists is that understanding those many ecological apparatuses and how they interact with each other is our best shot at modeling what will happen and how fucked or not fucked we might be. Birds may make up just one of those many systems, but eBird offers one of the few global data sets that can be measured across an annual cycle.
Still, eBird’s value follows a familiar tactic from large advertising platforms like Google and Facebook: lots and lots of signals generated by users of a free app. Which means a wealth of messy data points. The best way to overcome unreliable data? Get more of it at scale. When it comes to gathering information, there’s no such thing as excess.
Several people I spoke to compared the app to Pokémon, in the sense that they were motivated “to catch them all.” But in many ways, eBird is the flipside. Where Pokémon Go, the popular mobile iteration of the game, takes all of its massive stores of player geolocation data and sells it to — who else? — advertisers, the data collected by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is made publicly available and used for scientific research. In contrast to surveillance capitalism, this is, perhaps, surveillance naturalism.
It’s hard to know how much drinking will kill a person until it does.
In the early ’00s, Chris was in Maine’s music industry. He was the baritone sax player for a screamo band called Animal Suit Driveby, later rebranded The Killing Moon after the label asked for a more serious name. But more importantly, he was part of the scene. “We were raging, we were rampaging, having a good time,” he recalls. Reviewing our interview transcript later, I realize, for how often we’re talking about drinking, Chris tends to avoid the word itself.
That life — raging, rampaging, having a good time — extended into his 30s, even long after his moment in music passed.
Gemma had her concerns. Before he went out, she’d ask him tough questions that were, in hindsight, easy questions: Could he go out to dinner and not have six drinks alone? Could he resist going to a bar after that? Was it even possible to imagine limiting himself to just one drink?
So he got sober. It was hard for all the obvious reasons; it was also difficult because sobriety was so boring.
“When you’re in your 30s, that’s all you’ve done in your formative adult years. You have no actual hobbies, and all you are is that party person, and all your friends are those party people,” he says. Pulling out cold turkey — which, for most people, is the only way to do it — left him with existential questions: Who am I? What am I doing? What is interesting to me? What do I care about?
Chris goes birding for three, maybe four hours at a time. His favorite spot is near a waste-water treatment plant in Rochester, New Hampshire. Chris prefers the solitude of birding alone. He considers himself an introvert, at least ever since he stopped drinking. “I like to be able to pick up and go wherever, switch directions and drive somewhere else, and not have to worry about anyone else,” he says, which is good because he was by himself now anyway.
Two and a half years into their relationship, Gemma was offered a three-year contract at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which in addition to making eBird, is widely considered the best avian studies program in the world. The job was six hours west in upstate New York. Chris offered to pack up his life and move to Ithaca with her. Gemma said she was going alone.
Two weeks after Gemma left, Chris was diagnosed with stage 4 Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer that attacks white blood cells. Weirdly, he was good news / bad news about the whole thing. “First up, Hodgkin’s is a great cancer,” he says, citing its treatability, “but stage 4 is never a great stage to be in.”
More ups and downs: because the chemo jacked Chris’ body full of steroids, it actually made him feel pretty terrific for a day or two afterward — the perfect opportunity to get outside. No hikes, of course, but little drives to the beach to hobble around and observe some birds. Then, after the steroids wore off, Chris would spend the next week and a half feeling like absolute death.
He was stuck in this loop for six months straight: the brief high of treatment, followed by the drawn-out agony, all in the pursuit of staying alive long enough for the cancer to be exorcised from his body.
Even while he was being treated, getting pumped with four types of chemo, he was texting Gemma. They’d remained friends and talked every day. “A lot of times, it was like, ‘Check out this picture of this bird,’ that sort of thing, while I’m sitting, literally cooking from the inside,” he says, describing himself further as “a boiling, toxic mess.”
“I don’t think there’s ever a time when I go out that I don’t think of the genesis of this entire hobby and who brought it into my life,” he says.
The nice thing about getting outside and birding is that it reminded him of Gemma — but also, it reminded him of Gemma.
At its heart, eBird is a social network. It connects people to each other and also with birds.
But any social network must have social network problems, right? I ask Jenna Curtis, an eBird project leader who works on engagement and outreach. But first, she tells me about her “spark” — her first bird — and also her thousandth, memorable both because it was a Buller’s shearwater and because she saw it while at sea and seasick. “I was cheering my thousandth bird over the railing of a boat.”
I mentioned that a friend of mine in Brooklyn, a casual birder, is a huge eBird fan. But he told me that if you see an owl, it is bad etiquette to log it. In New York in particular, listing snowy owls in Central Park tended to activate waves of birders — too many, a number that would disturb the owl. Comedian Steve Martin had posted about the celebrity bird on Facebook; recently, the death of local hero Barry the Owl was reported out like it was a true-crime podcast (she was poisoned… before being hit by a truck!). Curtis says this can be the case with owls — they are “a charismatic bird” — and some other species, particularly endangered ones. Diplomatically, Wood told me he never wants to be quoted about “anything related to owls.”
Even a social network about birds has harassment issues, though this one is concerned about the safety of the birds.
But eBird also keeps an index of “sensitive species” for this reason, meaning that when a user observes one, it will be kept in their personal log but obscured from public view. No alerts will go out for sensitive birds. Falcons, often caught and traded to raptor trainers, are usually hidden from eBird for their own protection. (Even a social network about birds has harassment issues, though this one is concerned about the safety of the birds.)Somewhat ironically, a number of experts attributed the growing popularity of birding as a reaction to people’s growing dependence on screen time. Anecdotally, there are those who pick up birding because they wish to look at their phones less. But common trends in technology have also bolstered the hobby. There is eBird, of course, which capitalizes on our habit of posting things in an app. But there is also the proliferation of cheaper, better cameras — digital SLRs are available, and nearly everyone walks around with a powerful lens on their phone. The community of amateur photographers tends to organize in Facebook groups. An even broader community exists on Twitter, where birding evangelists help newbies identify species from grainy photos. #CrowOrNo is, self-explanatorily, a constant quiz of whether something is a crow or not.
But you can chart birding’s growing popularity through eBird’s user numbers, which have nearly doubled over the pandemic to more than a quarter-million people. (One person I talked to said, “Are you really a birder if you don’t use eBird?”) Last year, the app logged its billionth bird observation. Maybe we can spot birds faster than we lose them.
The academic world is cruel and a bit petty. “There’s the ‘publish or die’ concept, and you’re always comparing yourself to other people,” Gemma Clucas says. She spends a lot of her time writing things for journals that no one ever reads.
At Oxford, she researched the connectivity of penguin colonies in Antarctica. In Portsmouth, she studied Atlantic cod for her postdoc. Now, in Ithaca, one of her big projects is about seabird diets. “I’m just doing some fecal DNA analysis or whatever,” she says. The whatever, it turns out, involves going to common and roseate tern colonies in the Gulf of Maine, covering herself in plastic, getting pooped on, and collecting the samples. “And that tells me what they’re eating.”
I have about 400 questions. Like, is there a special poop-collecting jacket? There is not, she says — just the old clothes you don’t mind getting shit on.
So they poop on you, and you’re scraping off your shirt and…
“Yeah.”
She’ll take a couple weeks in the summer to visit the colony each day while they’re breeding. She’ll collect two to three hundred samples.
(It occurs to me that Gemma’s work has less to do with acquiring feces and more what she does with it after. This doesn’t change my line of questioning.)
Is there a thing you do to encourage them to poop?
“As soon as you come close to their nest, pooping on you is their defense mechanism.”
Before she got the offer from Cornell, Gemma was in the midst of a crisis of competence. For the last decade, academic jobs have become underfunded and underpaid, and that’s only made them more competitive. “I found it really hard to write the application,” she says. “I was like, ‘I can’t do this. I’m not good enough.’” Her acceptance at Cornell felt like a reversal of fortune. She had to take it.
When she told Chris about the job, that she was leaving, he had a panic attack. Gemma took him to the hospital. They would try to be friends.
Two months later, Gemma was back in the UK, visiting home, when Chris called to tell her about the cancer. She considered taking a break from Cornell to take care of him, worried about his health and also that he might relapse. “I wished we were still together because I would’ve dropped everything to go support him if I could,” she says. “But that wasn’t an option. That’s not what he wanted.”
They texted every day. Gemma went to visit. Chris was the kind of person resistant to getting support or, perhaps, admitting that he needed it. She tried to get him outside. “I think that helped,” Gemma says. “I like to think it helped.”
For a brief moment, the most famous birder was Christian Cooper. He was looking for songbirds in Central Park when he was accosted by a white woman named Amy Cooper, who threatened to call the police on Christian for being, in her eyes, a large and threatening Black man, even though he had a pair of dorky binoculars dangling from his neck.
It was a viral moment on Twitter before it reached other social platforms and then, inevitably, the cable news cycle. Lost in much of the conversation about anti-Blackness, white privilege, and policing was the fact that Christian Cooper was birding. It’s how their confrontation started: Christian asking Amy to put her dog on a leash since they scare away birds. But it seemed to her that the image of Christian was too incongruous, which is an insidious form of racism: when a person cannot reconcile what they perceive as an identity with what is actually in front of them. The usual reaction to that is defensiveness or fear or, in Amy’s case, indignation.
Nearly every person I talked to for this story at some point brought up the fact that birding is, historically, very white and often very male and usually made up of older people. But that’s not entirely the case.
Sheridan Alford is an environmental educator and also an advocate for younger, more diverse birders.
Binoculars, she says, are more conspicuous than I’d realized, especially if you’re birding somewhere that’s not a park. She has other tips for Black birders: go during the daytime, and if you have to go at night — for nocturnal birds, like owls — go in large groups; take along a dog or a white person; carry a field guide, less for what it says about nature but as proof that you’re birding, in case someone doubts you; and lastly, when birding takes you to private property, she “would not be caught dead on the other side of someone’s fence.”
If Twitter offers a hint of a community’s cross section, Alford sees more diversity than Black and white. She cites the South Americans being active on birding hashtags, “which makes sense because they have all the birds,” she says, admitting a little jealousy. She also sees Asians, who tend to be obsessed with the photography aspect of birding. (I concede to her that I have a Vietnamese uncle who does exactly this.)
Alford was one of the organizers of Black Birders Week, an online campaign to get people — newbies and veterans alike — out of their homes and into nature during the pandemic. The idea came from a group text called Black in STEM AF, after a conversation about Christian Cooper’s experience. Organized in a group chat and then spread across Instagram and Twitter, suddenly it was a national campaign and, since then, repeated annually. This month, National Geographic announced a TV series with Christian Cooper.
Before we get off the phone, Alford leaves me with one last piece of wisdom.
“You can always get started by just walking outside. You don’t have to get super expensive binoculars,” she says. “To see a bird is to bird. That’s all!”
By the end of 2020, Chris had moved back to rural Maine. His marketing job at Planet Fitness was mostly Zoom meetings anyway, so it hardly mattered where he was living. Why not save some money and get out of the city?
The cancer was in remission. He was still recovering from what the chemo did to his body. His eyebrows grew back. But after a year inside, the pandemic arrived and extended his lockdown.
Chris’ parents had a place in a tiny, remote town called Steuben. Now, between conference calls and emails, Chris could look out the window and glimpse a stoat, maybe a fox. One day, above the marsh, he caught sight of a small bird perched atop a scraggly, dead tree. At first, he thought it was a shrike — affectionately nicknamed a “butcherbird” for the way it murders field mice. But Chris looked closer and realized it was… a weird robin?
Initially, he assumed it was a juvenile robin. Young birds looked, to Chris, “disheveled and gross… the wrong color and speckle-y.” Ugly but unremarkable. He returned to his conference call. Yet something in the back of Chris’ mind screamed, This is not right. So he took his camera out and, from his desk, snapped a few photos of the bird.
The pictures were not great. They were pixelated, out of focus, foggy. (“It’s a shitty camera.”) He put the seven photos in a folder named “weird robin.” He sent it to Gemma.
Gemma was skeptical, knowing how excitable Chris could be. She tends to be more cautious since, in her field, there’s a stigma around getting things wrong. As an amateur, the stakes for Chris were a bit lower, which meant he could be more hopeful, more wishful, though that may have actually made the stakes higher.
Still, Gemma showed her co-workers at the Cornell Lab the photos of Chris’ “weird robin.”
Chris, proving that excitability, recounted that moment: “She started sending texts back from them. They’re like, ‘Holy shit, this is a redwing!’”
As a non-birder, this means nothing to me, so Chris explains: this bird is not an uncommon one. The redwing can be found easily in Sweden, Iceland, and in the UK when they migrate in the winter. But to see one thousands of miles away — across the Atlantic Ocean, no less — that was unbelievable. The enthusiasm around this bird was not what it was but where.
There’s a term for this observation: an ABA rarity, short for American Birding Association, which is responsible for, among other things, sending out an email of notable sightings.
“If there’s a rare bird in Maine and I’m not looking at it, I’m just miserable until then.”
Because of the reach of eBird’s “rare bird alert,” users like Chris feel some responsibility about what they report. Birders are known to descend on rare bird sightings in droves, sometimes in the hundreds, hoping to catch a glimpse. They’ll drive for hours; some might even hop on cross-country flights. This phenomenon is called “twitching.”It’s not just owls. In the fall of 2020, a European cuckoo had twitchers swarming Providence, Rhode Island. (You can guess what the headlines were.)
Chris understands this impulse because he, too, is an “unapologetic twitcher.”
How far do you go when you’re twitching?
“Not that long. Probably, like, two hours maybe.”
That’s pretty far.
“Like I said, people will drive, like, 15 hours.”
Chris was new to the area. He’d been there four months and had yet to meet his neighbors. He worried that setting off a chain of events that would result in droves of strangers showing up suddenly and with binoculars might piss off long-time Steuben residents. After all, you don’t live in a thousand-person town in rural Maine because you like company.
“It was like Chris’ dream come true but at the absolute worst time when he couldn’t have hundreds of birders flocking to see his bird,” Gemma says. “That was the really bittersweet thing about it.” (The redwing was not particularly special to her personally, having seen them often growing up in the UK.)
Chris’ other worry was that he looked like a bit of “a flatlander.”
“Flatlander” — is that a Maine thing or a birding thing?
“That’s a Maine thing.” He clarifies: if you’re “from away,” you’re a flatlander. “I’m a new guy in town. I’m a flatlander with New Hampshire plates.”
So Chris made a choice. He didn’t log it in eBird, worried that it might set off the ABA rarity email. Instead, he emailed the Audubon Society. He was connected with the staff naturalist, who then hit up someone at the Maine Bird Records Committee.
Etiquette aside, Chris still had his concerns about triggering a twitching. “I was like, ‘You can come to my parents’ house, but you can’t tell anyone.’ They were like, ‘Oh my god, yes.’”
It would have to be a secret but not a total secret. You know, for science. In the case of rare bird sightings, you bring in the authorities to verify it. Also, these guys really wanted to see this bird.
One of those guys, Louis Bevier, harbors some skepticism of eBird. His concerns come from 50 years of experience. In the ’70s, he was part of a movement that established record committees that encouraged people to write good descriptions, take clear photos, and capture audio recordings whenever they could — which would then be independently verified. He’s done bird work in California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and, finally, Maine, where he has been involved with the Maine Bird Records Committee for the past 17 years.
After proudly telling me he was not on any “of the social medias,” Bevier said he recognizes the power of what eBird collects. But he has some worries about the quality of the information. “When I review things, I’ll see people put in photographs of common birds, and they’re the wrong species,” he says.
All data sets are imperfect, but there are better ways to gauge error rates than what eBird is currently doing, Bevier says. To his knowledge, no one’s done a study on eBird’s accuracy.
A research associate at Cornell Labs, Frank La Sorte, pushed back on these criticisms of the information quality, arguing that sampling errors are a part of any data set. There are robust tools that account for these issues. On top of that, anomalies are manually verified by a team of volunteer eBird moderators.
But to Bevier, eBird is a new entrant that relies on amateurs rather than ones that are, to him, more rigorously vetted by experts. “In my years of reviewing records, I’ve seen the whole breadth of human behavior,” he says.
There are the embellishers; then, there are the straight-up liars, committing what I would describe as “bird fraud.” Sometimes it involves a bad Photoshop job. One guy took a picture of a common tern and put a different, larger head on it to make it appear to be a royal tern. The hope was his fake rare bird sighting might direct people to his photography business. Bevier also tells me about someone that lied about spotting a rare seabird from the Antarctic and made up some convoluted story about seeing it while on a boat in Monterey, California. His motives, to this day, are still unknown.
Most errors, of course, are honest ones. “People are just not being careful,” he says.
If it is human to err, maybe it comes from a place of optimism. The rigor of science and research will help us understand what’s wrong with the planet; but hope — even in the face of devastation — keeps people alive.
When Bevier heard about the redwing spotted in Steuben, he was suspicious, too. But it wasn’t entirely unexpected. BirdCast, another Cornell Labs product, uses eBird data to predict migration and weather patterns. Recently, it revealed that birds flying between Greenland, Iceland, and other parts of Europe had made appearances in the area. Even Bevier, with half a century of birding under his belt, had to be excited by the prospect of a redwing.
“Well, that would be the first record for Maine!”
Doug Hitchcox, the staff naturalist at Maine Audubon, gets dozens of emails a day asking him to identify birds: What’s this bird? Can you tell me what this is?
“And they’re robins. They’re almost all robins,” he says.
Hitchcox started as a volunteer for the Audubon. A decade later, now in his early 30s, he is a fixture of the Maine birding scene. Throughout our conversation, he alludes vaguely to the community, where certain figures will keep rare bird sightings to themselves, and how he’s had to overcome that “elitism.”
Hitchcox was visiting his family in Massachusetts for Christmas when he received Chris’ email with the redwing. Hitchcox turned to his loved ones and told them he had to go. He understands himself, you see: “If there’s a rare bird in Maine and I’m not looking at it, I’m just miserable until then,” he tells me.
The ABA has a numbered coding system for bird rarity. The highest is a five. Chris’ redwing clocked in at a four, which, Hitchcox says, “you maybe have a once-in-a-lifetime chance of seeing.” A code four happens in Maine maybe once every half-decade. A redwing may never appear in the state again. Christmas, by contrast, happens every year.
Three days later, Hitchcox woke up at 3AM. He picked up Louis Bevier in his Prius, and they drove up Route 1A toward the coast, admiring the ascending sun peeking over Acadia National Park. Bevier observed a thin crescent moon, rising as well, as they made their way to Steuben.
Chris greeted the duo at his house at 7AM, pleasant and slightly begrudging that it was the earliest he’d woken up during the pandemic. Despite his high spirits, he was nervous about bothering the locals. So they treaded lightly, so as to not upset Chris’ neighbors before he’d even met them. “We were three dudes walking around where there’s not usually three dudes walking around,” Chris says.
He showed them the perch where the bird sat when he’d snapped the original photos. Perhaps it might return to that spot. Then they wandered all over, hopeful.
By the end of the day, Hitchcox knew the names of all of Chris’ neighbors. “We talked about the bird, and it would turn into Chris just introducing himself, talking about how his family bought the house,” Hitchcox recounts. But after five hours of seeking out the rare bird, it never materialized. No redwing anywhere. Chris kept apologizing — “God, guys, I’m so sorry. I just feel terrible.”
I asked Hitchcox if he felt disappointed that day, and his response led me to believe that he had been nothing short of devastated: “There was my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity… gone.”
Bevier, who has been birding now for 50 years, was less disheartened: “I’m used to it, at this point. I don’t get dejected,” Bevier says. “That’s the breaks.”
Days later, a redwing did appear just 180 miles southwest in Portland, Maine. It was a much better, safer location for visiting birders — a public park instead of someone’s backyard. The ABA email announced it. The thrush stuck around the city for two weeks, where Hitchcox estimated a few hundred people turned up to witness it.
Hitchcox says the tone of our conversation would have been very different if the redwing hadn’t shown up in Portland. “I would not be laughing.”
After comparing his photos to what the ABA released, Chris is personally convinced that the redwing that appeared in Portland is a different one, based on the breast streaking. It wasn’t his redwing.
When the news of the rare bird in Portland emerged, Chris took pride in knowing he’d been the first person to sight one in Maine — and, later, quietly logged it in his phone.
Many rare birds are just lost. In 2018, a great black hawk — usually native to Central and South America — was spotted in Texas for the first time. A few months later, the same neotropical bird was found in Biddeford, Maine, then later in Portland. It was briefly the state’s celebrity bird before the hawk — a Mexican bird in Maine winter — suffered injuries from exposure and was euthanized. A statue of the bird exists now, monument to the stray raptor.
We know now what threw Chris’ redwing off course, turning it from a common European bird to a once-in-a-lifetime one in America. The catalyst: a low-pressure system, turning counterclockwise, scooped the redwing up and hurled it across the Atlantic. A 2018 study by Cornell Labs indicates these increasingly common wind changes are caused by climate change. What once was rare may become less so as our weather systems collapse.
I have a hard time reconciling it: that thousands of people will come to gawk at something because it is out of place. Or the irony of the massive carbon footprint created by people who want to appreciate something in nature.
The planet’s greatest threat is people that “have no connection with the natural world and don’t care.”
“Birdwatchers love these unusual sightings,” Frank La Sorte says after I tell him about Chris’ redwing. But this isn’t what scientists are interested in. They want to study patterns, not exceptions. “We want people to go out there and find the birds. We don’t want to discourage them. But as scientists, the outliers are statistically problematic.”The things we see every day are valuable. The once-in-a-lifetime experience that was so meaningful to Chris is the kind of data point that scientists tend to discard.
La Sorte sends me some of his research, gathered from eBird data, which has been published in scientific journals: migratory birds at higher risks because of climate change, something about anomalies in the mid-latitudes. I find even the summaries dense, so much so that he has to walk me through them.
With eBird, Cornell Labs has an extremely accessible way to get the average person to understand their surroundings. But that gets transformed into material published in fairly inaccessible journals.
“As a scientist, you’re focused on doing really rigorous science that often can be quite abstract,” La Sorte says. “Now I’m realizing that there’s importance in communicating this to a broader audience.” He’s working on publishing something that “synthesizes the material” and is written “in a more layman set of terms.”
eBird managing director Chris Wood has a simpler, more ambitious goal in mind. To him, the planet’s greatest threat is people that “have no connection with the natural world and don’t care.” Birders may be overeager, but in many ways, they overcome the biggest obstacle to a sustainable future: apathy.
It’s not until another 451 days that I talk to Chris Michaud again. The week before, he’d gotten checked out, and the cancer was still in remission. His eBird life list has risen to 342. According to an oddly specific app called Sober Time, he hasn’t had a drink in 1518.53 days.
More importantly, Chris is in a much better place now — emotionally, physically, and geographically (he’d moved back to Portsmouth). He’s still single, but he and Gemma talk, as friends, just as often as before. The new thing is that he’s into Zen Buddhist meditation, which he does daily. And, of course, there is still the birding. After our call, he says he’ll go out and enjoy it in the 70-degree weather.
The life-changing thing about Chris’ redwing wasn’t its appearance. It’s what he learned when it was over: that the rare bird event was another way to not think about what was really haunting his mind. “Seeing the redwing was a massive bright spot,” he says, “but I was in the deepest, darkest hole.” The truth was that the winter of 2020, which he spent isolated in a pastoral cabin, had put him in deep depression. “Woof,” Chris says, giving me the gritty details of his headspace.
With hindsight, he had a revelation: that a once-in-a-lifetime event is easier to conceive of because the things that happen every day are more painful. That to never have a drink again, he would have to wake up each morning and think about all the things he needed to do — exercise, bird, meditate — to move forward, to keep on living.
Do you think most about the past, present, or future?
“All the strategy in the world doesn’t actually solve anything whatsoever,” Chris says. “But yeah, it’s always the future.”
Do we have a future on this planet? I don’t know. Even the climate scientists, observing day by day the slow collapse of systems, aren’t sure. But maybe I was overthinking it. We could, like Chris, just take each day as it arrives. I returned to some advice I’d once been given:
To see a bird is to bird. That’s all!
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Read More »Satellites and AI Can Help Solve Big Problems—If Given the Chance
June 6th, 2022
Via Wired, a report on some of the hurdles that stand in the way of ambitious plans to use imagery to help feed people, reduce poverty, and protect the planet:
For the past three decades, three decades, geologist Carlos Souza has worked at the Brazil-based nonprofit Imazon, exploring ways he and the teams he coordinates can use applied science to protect the Amazon rainforest. For much of that time, satellite imagery has been a big part of his job.
In the early 2000s, Souza and colleagues came to understand that 90 percent of deforestation occurs within 5 kilometers of newly created roads. While satellites have long been able to track road expansion, the old way of doing things required people to label those findings by hand, amassing what would eventually become training data. Those years of labor paid off last fall with the release of an AI system that Imazon says reveals 13 times more roadway than the previous method, with an accuracy rate of between 70 and 90 percent.
Proponents of satellite imagery and machine learning have ambitious plans to solve big problems at scale. The technology can play a role in anti-poverty campaigns, protect the environment, help billions of people obtain street addresses, and increase crop yields in the face of intensifying climate change. A UNESCO report published this spring highlights 100 AI models with the potential to transform the world for the better. But despite recent advances in deep learning and the quality of satellite imagery, as well as the record number of satellites expected to enter orbit over the next few years, ambitious efforts to use AI to solve big problems at scale still encounter traditional hurdles, like government bureaucracy or a lack of political will or resources.
Stopping deforestation, for instance, requires more than spotting the problem from space. A Brazilian federal government program helped reduce deforestation from 2004 to 2012 by 80 percent compared to previous years, but then federal support waned. In keeping with an election promise, President Jair Bolsonaro weakened enforcement and encouraged opening the rainforest to industry and cattle ranch settlers. As a result, deforestation in the Amazon reached the highest levels seen in more than a decade.
Other AI-focused conservation groups have run into similar issues. Global Fishing Watch uses machine learning models to identify vessels that turn off GPS systems to avoid detection; they’re able to predict the type of ship, the kind of fishing gear it carries, and where it’s heading. Ideally that information helps authorities around the world target illegal fishing and inform decisions to board boats for inspection at sea, but policing large swaths of the ocean is difficult. Global Fishing Watch’s tech spotted hundreds of boats engaged in illegal squid fishing in 2020, data that head of research David Kroodsma credits with increasing cooperation between China and South Korea, but it didn’t lead to any particular prosecution. Enforcement in ports, he says, is “key to making deterrence scalable and affordable.”
Back on land, the consulting company Capgemini is working with The Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental group, to track trails in the Mojave Desert and protect endangered animal habitats from human activity. In a pilot program last year, the initiative mapped trails created by off-road vehicles in hundreds of square miles of satellite imagery in Clark County, Nevada, to create an AI model that can automatically identify newly created roads. Based on that work, The Nature Conservancy intends to expand the project to monitor the entirety of the desert, which stretches more than 47,000 square miles across four US states.
However, as in the Amazon, identifying problem areas only gets you so far if there aren’t enough resources to act on those findings. The Nature Conservancy uses its AI model to inform conversations with land managers about potential threats to wildlife or biodiversity. Conservation enforcement in the Mojave Desert is overseen by the US Bureau of Land Management, which only has about 270 rangers and special agents on duty.
In northern Europe, the company Iceye got its start monitoring ice buildup in the waters near Finland with microsatellites and machine learning. But in the past two years, the company began to predict flood damage using microwave wavelength imagery that can see through clouds at any time of day. The biggest challenge now, says Iceye’s VP of analytics, Shay Strong, isn’t engineering spacecraft, data processing, or refining machine learning models that have become commonplace. It’s dealing with institutions stuck in centuries-old ways of doing things.
“We can more or less understand where things are going to happen, we can acquire imagery, we can produce an analysis. But the piece we have the biggest challenge with now is still working with insurance companies or governments,” she says.
“It’s that next step of local coordination and implementation that it takes to come up with action,” says Hamed Alemohammad, chief data scientist at the nonprofit Radiant Earth Foundation, which uses satellite imagery to tackle sustainable development goals like ending poverty and hunger. “That’s where I think the industry needs to put more emphasis and effort. It’s not just about a fancy blog post and deep learning model.”
It’s often not only about getting policymakers on board. In a 2020 analysis, a cross-section of academic, government, and industry researchers highlighted the fact that the African continent has a majority of the world’s uncultivated arable land and is expected to account for a large part of global population growth in the coming decades. Satellite imagery and machine learning could reduce reliance on food imports and turn Africa into a breadbasket for the world. But, they said, lasting change will necessitate a buildup of professional talent with technical knowledge and government support so Africans can make technology to meet the continent’s needs instead of importing solutions from elsewhere. “The path from satellite images to public policy decisions is not straightforward,” they wrote.
Labaly Toure is a coauthor of that paper and head of the geospatial department at an agricultural university in Senegal. In that capacity and as founder of Geomatica, a company providing automated satellite imagery solutions for farmers in West Africa, he’s seen satellite imagery and machine learning help decision-makers recognize how the flow of salt can impact irrigation and influence crop yields. He’s also seen it help settle questions of how long a family has been on a farm and assist with land management issues.
Sometimes free satellite images from services like NASA’s LandSat or the European Space Agency’s Sentinel program suffice, but some projects require high-resolution photos from commercial providers, and cost can present a challenge.
“If decision-makers know [the value] it can be easy, but if they don’t know, it’s not always easy,” Toure said.
Back in Brazil, in the absence of federal support, Imazon is now forging ties with more policymakers at the state level. “Right now, there’s no evidence the federal government will lead conservation or deforestation efforts in the Amazon,” says Souza. In October 2022, Imazon signed cooperation agreements with public prosecutors gathering evidence of environmental crimes in four Brazilian states on the border of the Amazon rainforest to share information that can help prioritize enforcement resources.
When you prosecute people who deforest protected lands, the damage has already been done. Now Imazon wants to use AI to stop deforestation before it happens, interweaving that road-detection model with one designed to predict which communities bordering the Amazon are at the highest risk of deforestation within the next year.
Deforestation continued at historic rates in early 2022, but Souza is hopeful that through work with nonprofit partners, Imazon can expand its deforestation AI to the other seven South American countries that touch the Amazon rainforest.
And Brazil will hold a presidential election this fall. The current leader in the polls, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is expected to strengthen enforcement agencies weakened by Bolsonaro and to reestablish the Amazon Fund for foreign reforestation investments. Lula’s environmental plan isn’t expected out for a few months, but environmental ministers from his previous term in office predict he will make reforestation a cornerstone of his platform.
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Read More »“Black Ships” and Space: Using Satellites To Combat Illegal Fishing
June 1st, 2022
Via The Interpreter, a report on the use of satellite technology to tackle China’s illegal fishing:
At the first in-person leaders’ summit of the Quad in Washington in September last year, the four member countries came forward with an ambitious space agenda. A working group was giving the task of advancing a number of key strategic areas, including the exchange of satellite data with the ambition to “protect the earth and its waters”.
Little progress on space matters was obvious in the public domain in the months following, until in the lead-up to the second in-person leaders’ summit in Tokyo this week the Financial Times reported that a new maritime initiative would emerge from the gathering. The initiative would look to curb illegal fishing in the Indo-Pacific by using satellite technology to connect existing systems in the region to create a comprehensive tracking system. A US official stated that “China was responsible for 95 per cent of illegal fishing in the region”.
The Quad Leaders’ Tokyo Summit Fact Sheet details this new Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA), “a near-real-time, integrated, and cost-effective maritime domain awareness picture”. It will look to harness commercially available data using existing technologies such as radio-frequency technologies. The Fact Sheet notes that due to its commercial origin, data will be unclassified, allowing the Quad to provide it to a wide range of partners who wish to benefit.
It would support the region in pushing back against the grey-zone incursions into foreign waters and the bullying of local fishing vessels.
One aim will be to identify so-called “black ships”, those vessels that turn-off usual tracking transponders to engage in illicit activity such as illegal fishing, smuggling or piracy. Fishing fleets from China in particular have increasingly troubled countries in the Indo-Pacific and similarly plundered waters around the world. In March 2021, Chinese fishing vessels were found anchored in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone and in one instance had rammed and sunk a Filipino fishing vessel. Sparking outrage from Ecuador, Chinese fleets have and been tracked to as far as the Galapagos and also stand accused of using “football stadium-style lighting” to plunder fisheries in shared waters between North Korea, Japan, and Russia.
The proliferation of earth observation and reconnaissance satellites make it now viable to track vessels that have turned off their transponders. As of 2022, there is an estimated to be about 5,700 operating satellites in space, with more are coming. In just the last year, more than 1,700 spacecraft and satellites went into orbit via 133 successful launches.
The IPMDA initiative would provide both environmental and security benefits to the region. Identifying China’s fleets would assist in levying faster attribution to their actions – it would support the region in pushing back against the grey-zone incursions into foreign waters and the bullying of local fishing vessels. Chinese ship have even been found not to be engaging in fishing, but instead encouraged financially to operate alongside Chinese law enforcement and military vessels to achieve political objectives in disputed waters.
The IPMDA should be strongly welcomed. It provides a substantive and a tangible action beyond the plethora of verbal commitments that emerge from other forums. It also builds on a bilateral agreements made by Quad member countries – it could also provide an avenue for integration with other countries interested in engaging with the Quad.
Another initiative announced at the Tokyo meeting was the opening of a “Quad Satellite Data Portal” that will look to aggregate links to respective national satellite data resources which can support efforts to build disaster resilience against the challenges posed by climate change.
However, the Quad can do more in the space realm. An opportunity exists to act on its commitment to “consult on norms and guidelines” for space and establish a Quad commitment to ban anti-satellite tests – as unilaterally announced by the United States in April this year. This kind of commitment would support discussions at a new UN Open Ended Working Group that seek to develop new norms for behaviour in space. Such a commitment by the Quad would show the value of “minilateral” mediums which are less constricted than larger groupings.
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Read More »With Technology, Animals-Turned-Oceanographers Are Helping Biologists Track Marine Lifeg
June 1st, 2022
Via Knowable Magazine, an article on the use of technology to turn animals into oceanographers:
There’s only one word for it: indescribable. “It’s one of those awesome experiences you can’t put into words,” says fish ecologist Simon Thorrold. Thorrold is trying to explain how it feels to dive into the ocean and attach a tag to a whale shark — the most stupendous fish in the sea. “Every single time I do it, I get this huge adrenaline rush,” he says. “That’s partly about the science and the mad race to get the tags fixed. But part of it is just being human and amazed by nature and huge animals.”
Whale sharks are one of a select group of large marine animals that scientists like Thorrold, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, have signed up as ocean-going research assistants. Fitted with electronic tags incorporating a suite of sensors, tracking devices and occasionally tiny cameras, they gather information where human researchers can’t. They have revealed remarkable journeys across entire oceans, and they have shown that diving deep is pretty much ubiquitous among large marine predators of all kinds.
Many regularly plunge hundreds and sometimes thousands of meters — to depths where the water can be dangerously cold and short of oxygen, there’s little or no light except for the flickers and flashes of bioluminescent organisms, and the pressure is immense, putting some animals at risk of fatal decompression sickness.
To function at such depths, deep-diving species have evolved an array of anatomical and physiological adaptations — thick, insulating blubber, for instance, or blood vessels transformed into heat-exchange systems, collapsible lungs and oxygen-storing muscles, and ultra-sensitive eyes, to name but a few. But what drove these great predators to acquire their remarkable diving skills?
For most biologists, the answer is a no-brainer: Food. Yet that’s been remarkably hard to prove. After decades of tagging studies, there’s enough circumstantial evidence to be confident that many top predators do dive deep in search of prey. But even now, only one species has been seen in action. The northern elephant seal (Mirounga angustirostris) is now something of a superstar, thanks to a pioneering series of mini-movies featuring its own snout and whiskers and a supporting cast of deep-sea fish and squid.
Food, though, might not be the deep sea’s only attraction, says Thorrold, coauthor of an article that examines the motivation of diving predators in the 2022 Annual Review of Marine Science. Dives and diving behavior vary: Some animals dive many times an hour, others sporadically. Most stick to depths between 200 and 1,000 meters, a region officially named the mesopelagic but better known as the twilight zone; others plunge far deeper. The shapes of dives hint at more than one function, too. A quick downward plunge and equally steep ascent, for instance, suggests a different purpose from a long, slow, flat-bottomed dive. “If the same individual does different types of dive at different times,” says Thorrold, “then that’s good evidence they are for different purposes.”
There is no shortage of suggestions for what those purposes might be. Deep, dimly lit waters could provide refuge from other predators; somewhere to cool an overheating body; navigational cues for those able to detect them; even a long-distance communication channel. “All these ideas are in play,” says Thorrold. “The fact we can’t rule out any of them reflects how mysterious a lot of these large pelagic animals are to us.”
Welcome to the deep-sea diner
Diving deep has evolved in nearly every type of ocean-going vertebrate. Big bony fish, such as tuna and swordfish, do it. Cartilaginous sharks and rays do it. So, too, do air-breathing animals — penguins, sea turtles, toothed whales and seals, all of which reach extraordinary depths on a single breath.Most dive as far down as the twilight zone, where the dim light from above rapidly dwindles to nothing. Some go into the blackness of the midnight zone, the bathypelagic realm between 1,000 and 4,000 meters. The current record-holder is Cuvier’s beaked whale: In 2014, one tagged whale reached 2,992 meters off the coast of Southern California. The record for a fish is held by a whale shark that reached 1,928 meters in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Biologists of times past would never have dreamt that deep waters would have much to offer a top predator. In the 19th century, naturalists believed that little lived deeper than 500 meters or so — but in the 1940s, Navy sonar operators discovered the deep scattering layer, a zone where their sonar bounced off multitudes of mesopelagic organisms. This food-packed layer moved up and down as fish and tiny invertebrates migrated toward the surface to feed at night and retreated to the relative safety of deep water during the day.
The ocean’s twilight zone turned out to be an unexpectedly well-stocked larder, filled with weird and wonderful gelatinous creatures, muscular squid, the ubiquitous and highly nutritious lanternfish and the spiny-toothed bristlemouth, reckoned to be the world’s most abundant vertebrate. In 1980, fisheries scientists estimated the global biomass of mesopelagic fish at a billion metric tons, based on surveys with nets. In 2014, a study based on acoustic surveys put the figure seven to 10 times higher.
As yet, there is no global estimate of the life in the chill, black depths of the midnight zone, but a study in the waters over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge found an even greater mass of potential prey there. “Diving to forage makes sense if deep water is where the biomass is,” says Thorrold.
Until very recently, though, all the supporting evidence for foraging was circumstantial. Mesopelagic fish, squid and crustaceans turned up in the stomachs of tuna, swordfish and blue sharks, while sperm whale stomachs contained the indigestible beaks of deep-sea squid, including the giant squid Architeuthis. Tagging studies consistently put predator and prey in the same place at the same time. They’ve shown that large fish and mammals regularly and repeatedly dive into the deep scattering layer, and often dive deeper during the day when potential prey has migrated further into the gloom. Some tagged tuna and swordfish track precisely the daily migration of potential prey.
With the development of increasingly sophisticated tags, biologists are building an ever more detailed picture of what these animals are doing in the depths. Attached to fins and flippers, heads and jaws, they collect and store a wide range of data over many months. Tags that include sensors for pressure, temperature and light have enabled researchers to reconstruct movements through the water and the depth and profile of dives. The past few years have seen the emergence of innovative extras — accelerometers that log the twisting and turning of a head, sensors that detect the movement of jaws, sound-detecting hydrophones, even a smart video camera that shoots only moments worth recording.
Getting these tags onto top predators is hugely challenging. “Whale sharks are rare and elusive, but we’ve now gotten a good number of tags on them,” says Thorrold. Fearsome sharks like the great white are challenging for a different reason. Free diving is not an option, and if you want to tag the creature’s dorsal fin, you need a ship with a hydraulic platform to lift the shark aboard, where the operation can be carried out safely.
Swordfish are particularly tricky to tag. They are hard to find, unpredictable and dangerous, as Thorrold’s coauthor Peter Gaube, an oceanographer at the University of Washington, can testify. “When you do catch one, you have to hold it alongside the boat and try to fix the tags while it tries to whack you or bash a hole in the boat with that razor-sharp sword.”
The devil’s in the details
Some of the best evidence of foraging has come from unexpected quarters — such as the Chilean devil ray (Mobula tarapacana), a huge but mysterious fish with a “wingspan” of almost4 meters. Most sightings of Chilean devil rays come from surface waters, where they often seem to bask in the sun, a habit that led to the assumption that they prefer life nearer the surface.Curious to know more about them, Thorrold and colleagues made two tagging expeditions to the Azores, where large numbers of devil rays gather around the Princess Alice seamount for a few months each year. In 2011, the team tagged four rays; in 2012, they tagged 11 more. The tags logged the rays’ movements for up to five months before transmitting their data back to Woods Hole.
The results were staggering: Not only did the devil rays travel thousands of kilometers at a cracking pace, they frequently plunged 1,000 meters and more. The deepest recorded dive was 1,896 meters. The sun-soaking, surface-dwelling rays are anything but: They are among the deepest diving fish in the sea, and everything points to food as the attraction.
Most of the devil ray dives had an unusual stepwise profile. “They dive deep, then level for a bit, come up a bit and level again, and so on,” says Thorrold. “If you look at sonar, it seems they stop off where there are thin but dense layers of prey. We haven’t been able to see what they are doing, but this is strong evidence that they are foraging.”
That would explain why Chilean devil rays have a network of well-developed blood vessels in their brain cavity, much like that found in some deep-diving sharks, where it functions as a heat-exchange system to prevent the brain from growing too cold. Biologists had always wondered why a fish that lives in the sunlit upper waters of the ocean would need one. “This is more evidence that devil rays forage at depth and so need to keep their brain and sensory systems active in the cold,” says Thorrold.
As for basking in the sun — that, Thorrold suggests, is to warm up before and after deep dives.
Like devil rays, tag-toting sharks have been providing intriguing glimpses of behavior that lends more weight to the idea that they hunt in deep waters. Most of what we know of sharks comes from studies in coastal waters — yet many migrate vast distances across the open ocean. Away from the seal-studded coasts, prey becomes patchy and thinly spread. So how do big sharks get enough to eat?
Recent research suggests that some sharks have a smart strategy to gain access to the ocean’s biggest buffet. Data from two great white sharks and 15 blue sharks as they traveled the North Atlantic showed that they take advantage of eddies, swirling masses of water that break away from the Gulf Stream. Eddies that spin off the northern edge of the Gulf Stream trap warmer water from the south; eddies formed from the southern edge carry cool water southward. Both white and blue sharks showed a marked preference for warm-hearted eddies.
These warm eddies contain a higher density of mesopelagic prey, acoustic surveys have shown. And with anomalously warm water extending hundreds of meters, sharks can forage much deeper and for longer. “Warm eddies can provide sharks access to deeper food sources that would otherwise be inaccessible,” says Gaube, a coauthor of the research.
Sound and vision
The nearest thing to proof that marine predators evolved extreme diving skills to exploit a rich but otherwise inaccessible source of food is coming from animals wearing tags with extra bells and whistles.In the case of the short-finned pilot whale (Globicephala macrorhynchus), that meant a sound recorder. Pilot whales emit a series of clicks while they hunt, listening for echoes bouncing off prey. As they close in on a target, the clicks come so thick and fast they merge to a buzz. Natacha Aguilar de Soto, a marine biologist at the University of La Laguna, Tenerife, in Spain’s Canary Islands, decided to eavesdrop on local pilot whales during their dives and fitted 23 of them with sound-recording tags.
The tagged whales dived deep, reaching a maximum of 1,019 meters, clicking as they went. Just before the deepest point of a dive, the clicks turned to buzzes — a sign that a whale was about to launch its attack. On the occasions when a whale dived very deep, it made a final, high-speed dash before it buzzed, which Aguilar de Soto interprets as an extra push in pursuit of fleeing prey, something large enough to be worth drawing on a rapidly dwindling oxygen supply, such as a Grimaldi scaled squid (a meter long plus tentacles) or even perhaps a giant squid.
Hearing the sound of the hunt is convincing, but it’s still not proof. “We need to see what these predators are doing,” says Thorrold. For now, biologists must content themselves with the short snippets of film shot by the northern elephant seal.
Female northern elephant seals make good research assistants, especially those belonging to the colony in Año Nuevo State Park, just north of Santa Cruz. Biologists from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), have been running a research program there for more than half a century. The Año Nuevo elephant seals have the advantage of being accessible: Like others of their kind, they haul out on land in the winter to pup and mate, and again in the spring or summer to molt.
In between, the males remain in coastal waters, but the females migrate thousands of kilometers across the Pacific and back again, diving continuously as they travel. It’s a lot simpler to fit tags and retrieve them later than it is for, say, a great white shark, and there are expert elephant seal wranglers on hand to help. “It can be dangerous, though,” says Japanese biologist Taiki Adachi, who has worked with the seals for more than a decade and is currently based at UCSC. “They are very big and aggressive, and are especially scary in the breeding season, when the mothers have to protect their pups and males are defending their harem.”
Adachi recently reported that migrating female elephant seals dive almost continuously for 20 or more hours each day. “They mostly dive to 400 to 600 meters, the depth where small fish — especially oil-rich lanternfish — are very abundant,” he says. Sometimes they go far deeper, consistently diving 800 meters or more: The maximum recorded for this species is 1,735 meters.
At Japan’s National Institute of Polar Research, Adachi’s colleague Yasuhiko Naito developed an ingenious jaw-motion recorder that logs a seal’s attempts to snatch prey from the water. Fitted to the seal’s lower jaw, the device logged 1,000 to 2,000 attempts a day. The clincher, though, came from another of Naito’s innovations: a smart video tag that is attached to the seal’s jaw or head. The camera and lights are triggered by a combination of depth and the movements characteristic of a strike, a system that makes the most of the tag’s limited battery power.
The first elephant seal selfies, taken by one individual seal and published in 2017, showed it trying to catch fish some 800 meters down. The 21 fuzzy images showed parts of what were later identified as large, deep-sea ragfish. With the help of more camera-carrying seals, the team eventually had 48 hours of footage from 240 meters to more than 1,000 meters deep and capturing almost 700 attacks. The quality was good enough to identify not just the type of prey but in some cases the species. They included the little lanternfish, ragfish and a type of hake, plus half a dozen different squid, including cockeyed squid and glass squid.
A place of greater safety
Aside from diving for food, there is evidence that dives, especially more extreme ones, serve other purposes. Escaping from more formidable predators is a definite contender.Take yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares), which spend most of their time in the ocean’s upper 200 meters. In 2020, fisheries biologist Tim Lam, from the University of Massachusetts Boston, reported that six of 17 tuna he tagged in the waters off Hawaii appeared to have had a run-in with a predator. Four dived deep — three of them to around 1,000 meters — and then lost their tags, possibly during frantic maneuvers as they tried to escape, Lam suggests. A fifth tuna plunged suddenly from 134 meters to 1,592 meters — a dash interpreted as a possible attempt to outrun an enemy. When it returned to the surface, it appeared to have the jitters, spending the whole day near the surface before resuming normal activity.
And, then there was the one that didn’t get away: Data from its tag showed that it reached a depth of 326 meters and then everything went dark and the temperature rose, probably because it was inside the stomach of a false killer whale or short-finned pilot whale.
Elephant seals also seem to take advantage of the dimly lit depths to avoid their enemies. The commonest cause of death for these seals is thought to be predation by sharks or killer whales while at sea, says physiological ecologist Roxanne Beltran, who works on the Año Nuevo elephant seal program. “But we see lots of seals come to shore with fresh or healing shark bites, so clearly it’s possible to evade their predators.”
Biologists studying the northern elephant seals at Año Nuevo State Park in California fit and retrieve tags when the animals haul out on land after their long-distance migrations. Here, they are looking for a tagged female that has just returned.
One way is to head downward. An early hint that the seals do just that came from a test run of a novel tag more than a decade ago. As part of research on the impacts of underwater noise, bioacoustician Selene Fregosi of Oregon State University fitted young elephant seals at Año Nuevo with a prototype tag that played back recorded sounds. The idea was to expose seals to short bursts of various noises and see how they react. The playlist included echolocating clicks and whistles of killer whales and sperm whales; both sent elephant seals into steep dives. If a seal was already diving, it accelerated; if it was on its return to the surface, it turned tail and dived deeper, in one case almost doubling its original depth.
Last year, Beltran and colleagues reported that elephant seals don’t just flee into the darkness, they also rest there. Elephant seals are more likely to be killed in the brightly lit upper ocean, where sharks and killer whales are common. They have time only for short breaks from foraging, drifting effortlessly for 10 to 20 minutes at a time. Their preference, Beltran discovered, is to rest several hundred meters below the surface. And the fatter and fitter they become, the deeper they go in search of greater safety.
What, then, of other suggested reasons for diving into the deep?
Navigation looks highly likely. Almost all large marine predators migrate long distances at some point in their lives. Some — including sharks and turtles — are known to be capable of detecting cues provided by Earth’s magnetic field, sensing gradients in magnetic intensity and anomalies created by geological features such as seamounts. “Animals that can sense these cues might dive deep, where the signals are stronger,” says Thorrold. Leatherback turtles make extreme dives only during long migrations, suggesting they might be checking they are on the right route. Hammerhead sharks in the Gulf of California are thought to find their way to and from seamounts by sensing the local magnetic “landscape.”
There’s a single example of a species that appears to dive to cool off. Atlantic bluefin tuna spend months each year in cold temperate waters and have evolved a highly effective way to maintain their body heat — but they spawn in the subtropical Gulf of Mexico, where that’s a handicap. In an apparent strategy to avoid overheating, the tuna dive below 500 meters as they enter and leave the Gulf and stay below 200 meters while they spawn.
That leaves the possibility that the deep sea is a good place to talk. There’s a zone that stretches from a depth of a few hundred meters to more than a thousand, where sound travels further, making it ideal for long-distance communication. When blue and fin whales are in the zone, they can be heard an estimated 1,700 kilometers away, though no one knows if they go there for that specific purpose.
“There’s so much we don’t know, even with the technology that’s become available in the past 20 years,” says Thorrold. The future tech wish list is long. Thorrold and his colleagues are testing a prototype tag that can locate an animal’s position in the water column with much greater accuracy. They’d love to have tags that send back only relevant data from the vast quantities recorded over many months at sea.
Top of the list, though, are small, smart cameras. If elephant seals can make such great movies, why couldn’t other top predators? “We need better fish-cams that are small enough to mount on tuna, sharks and swordfish,” says Thorrold. “They need to be miniaturized but high-resolution, able to operate in low light levels and log data during the long periods they are traveling the open ocean.”
In short, seeing is believing. Besides, who wouldn’t want to watch a great white shark’s home movies?
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Read More »An Ocean First: Underwater Drone Tracks CO2 In Alaska Gulf
May 26th, 2022
Via AP News, an article on the use of underwater drones to to measure carbon dioxide levels in the ocean:
In the cold, choppy waters of Alaska’s Resurrection Bay, all eyes were on the gray water, looking for one thing only.
It wasn’t a spout from humpback whales that power through this scenic fjord, or a sea otter lazing on its back, munching a king crab.
Instead, everyone aboard the Nanuq, a University of Alaska Fairbanks research vessel, was looking where a 5-foot (1.52-meter) long, bright pink underwater sea glider surfaced.
The glider — believed to be the first configured with a large sensor to measure carbon dioxide levels in the ocean — had just completed its first overnight mission.
Designed to dive 3,281 feet (1,000 meters) and roam remote parts of the ocean, the autonomous vehicle was deployed in the Gulf of Alaska this spring to provide a deeper understanding of the ocean’s chemistry in the era of climate change. The research could be a major step forward in ocean greenhouse gas monitoring, because until now, measuring CO2 concentrations — a quantifier of ocean acidification — was mostly done from ships, buoys and moorings tethered to the ocean floor.
“Ocean acidification is a process by which humans are emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through their activities of burning fossil fuels and changing land use,” said Andrew McDonnell, an oceanographer with the College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks
Oceans have done humans a huge favor by taking in some of the C02. Otherwise, there would be much more in the atmosphere, trapping the sun’s heat and warming the Earth.
“But the problem is now that the ocean is changing its chemistry because of this uptake,” said Claudine Hauri, an oceanographer with the International Arctic Research Center at the university.
The enormous amount of data collected is being used to study ocean acidification that can harm and kill certain marine life.
Rising acidity of the oceans is affecting some marine organisms that build shells. This process could kill or make an organism more susceptible to predators.
Over several weeks this spring, Hauri and McDonnell, who are married, worked with engineers from Cyprus Subsea Consulting and Services, which provided the underwater glider, and 4H-Jena, a German company that provided the sensor inserted into the drone.
Most days, researchers took the glider farther and farther into Resurrection Bay from the coastal community of Seward to conduct tests.
After its first nighttime mission, a crew member spotted it bobbing in the water, and the Nanuq — the Inupiat word for polar bear — backed up to let people pull the 130-pound (59-kilogram) glider onto the ship. Then the sensor was removed from the drone and rushed into the ship’s cabin to upload its data.
Think of the foot-tall (0.30-meter) sensor with a diameter of 6 inches (15.24 centimeters) as a laboratory in a tube, with pumps, valves and membranes moving to separate the gas from seawater. It analyzes CO2 and it logs and stores the data inside a temperature-controlled system. Many of these sensor components use battery power.
Since it’s the industry standard, the sensor is the same as found on any ship or lab working with CO2 measurements.
Hauri said using this was “a huge step to be able to accommodate such a big and power hungry sensor, so that’s special about this project.”
“I think she is one of the first persons to actually utilize (gliders) to measure CO2 directly, so that’s very, very exciting,” said Richard Feely, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s senior scientist at the agency’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. He said Hauri was a graduate student in 2007 when she accompanied him on the first acidification cruise he ever led.
The challenge, Feely said, is to make the measurements on a glider with the same degree of accuracy and precision as tests on board ships.
“We need to get confidence in our measurements and confidence in our models if we are going to make important scientific statements about how the oceans are changing over time and how it’s going to impact our important economic systems that are dependent on the food from the sea,” he said, noting that acidification impacts are already seen in the Pacific Northwest on oysters, Dungeness crabs and other species.
Researchers in Canada had previously attached a smaller, prototype CO2 sensor to an underwater drone in the Labrador Sea but found it did not yet meet the targets for ocean acidification observations.
“The tests showed that the glider sensor worked in a remote-harsh environment but needed more development,” Nicolai von Oppeln-Bronikowski, the Glider Program Manager with the Ocean Frontier Institute at Memorial University of Newfoundland, said in an email.
The two teams are “just using two different types of sensors to solve the same issue, and it’s always good to have two different options,” Hauri said.
There is no GPS unit inside the underwater autonomous drone. Instead, after being programmed, it heads out on its own to cruise the ocean according to the navigation directions — knowing how far to go down in the water column, when to sample, and when to surface and send a locator signal so it can be retrieved.
As the drone tests were underway, the U.S. research vessel Sikuliaq, owned by the National Science Foundation and operated by the university, conducted its own two-week mission in the gulf to take carbon and pH samples as part of ongoing work each spring, summer and fall.
Those methods are limited to collecting samples from a fixed point while the glider will be able to roam all over the ocean and provide researchers with a wealth of data on the ocean’s chemical makeup.
The vision is to one day have a fleet of robotic gliders operating in oceans across the globe, providing a real-time glimpse of current conditions and a way to better predict the future.
“We can … understand much more about what’s going on in the ocean than we have been before,” McDonnell said.
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Read More »Unearthing A World Under The Waves
May 22nd, 2022
Courtesy of National Geographic, an article on the application of space exploration technology to marine systems in an effort to expose life on Earth – and help protect it:
National Geographic Explorer Ved Chirayath has contemplated life outside of Earth since he can remember. By five years old, he was determined to work for NASA. His steps were carefully plotted: study astrophysics, continue his education in Russia, and earn a graduate degree from Stanford University. And though he was just a boy when he first ideated the ambitious plans, he has managed to achieve it all.
Now, with a trail of astronomy achievements under his belt, Chirayath, a researcher, photographer, and inventor, is putting a spin on his childhood dreams by redirecting his focus from the skies to Earth’s ocean.
“I’ve spent a lot of time looking at space, and there’s just nothing that compares to the beauty and the wonder that is under the sea,” Chirayath says, adding that of the new worlds he’s hoped to find “ours is the coolest one I can see to the edge of our solar system.”
While collective human interest seems to have largely favored the stars, Chirayath sees the urgency in exploring planet Earth.“We have the ability to see and even redirect a potential asteroid collision,” he goes on, “but there’s a separate cataclysmic, extinction-level event happening now, and that’s climate change.”
Nature’s ability to survive under extreme conditions is evident, Chirayath points out. “I think the question that’s now coming in front of our species is ‘will humans be part of the future of life on Earth?’”
His conviction to protect the planet came after years spent in search of life elsewhere. Library texts and astronomy club peers helped him engineer his own telescopes, which, through various trials, grew larger in size. By the time he was 16, Chirayath had discovered a planet, intentionally using only amateur equipment available to the average stargazer–a consumer digital camera, which he modified with the correct sensitivity, strapped to a telescope.
By tracking changes in the brightness of a star that the planet orbited, Chirayath would prove he had indeed detected something new outside the atmosphere, roughly one-and-a-half times the size of Jupiter and traveling fast. This discovery landed Chirayath a scholarship for the next phase of living out his childhood ambitions, continuing his studies in Russia.
While earning his undergraduate degree in particle physics in Moscow, he worked as a fashion photographer for Vogue. It was a way “to do something different and help pay the bills,” Chirayath laughs, and since, his photography has splashed the pages of the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Elle.
He went on to pursue his graduate studies in aeronautics and astronautics, during which he built an instrument capable of flying on electric fields, inspired by aircrafts seen on “Star Trek.”
Blending his interest in photography and space technology, Chirayath directed his lens to the cosmos, and eventually, the ocean floor.
“I got into astronomy imaging, and that was incredibly rewarding for me because it’s like getting the chance to look into the sea, but without all of the challenges of the water,” he explains.
Through a decade-long career at NASA, Chirayath has directed the Laboratory for Advanced Sensing (LAS) at the space research giant’s Ames Center in California’s Silicon Valley. His focus has been on designing the next generation of sensing technologies to better understand this world and explore the universe beyond. This led to two major inventions: an instrument called a FluidCam, capable of seeing through ocean waves clearly in a process called fluid lensing and its more powerful successor, which Chirayath named MiDAR.
He is currently the director of the Aircraft Center for Earth Studies at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science where they use next-generation scientific platforms to explore the Earth’s atmosphere as well as ocean systems.
Since 2012, Chirayath has transitioned from searching for life elsewhere in the universe to uncovering and protecting marine ecosystems on Earth. The shift, he says, he owes in part to meeting sea exploration pioneer and fellow National Geographic Explorer, Sylvia Earle.
“She pulled me aside in the way that she does and she said, ‘you can take all of your talents and devote them to space. You can also devote them to protecting Earth, and here’s why you should do it,’” Chirayath remembers.
“I still feel like I’m doing the same science. You’re looking at dark objects and it just happens to be the telescope is no longer pointing up, it’s pointing down,” he laughs.
But the experience is dramatically different. Moving away from “doing astronomy on a cold mountaintop alone to being surrounded by life in the water” solidified Chirayath’s decision to shift gears.
Rather than look for potential life in space, he recognized the abundance of it right in front of him–begging to be stewarded.
He’s currently using drones capable of seeing through waves, applying sensing technologies he designated for space, to map and photograph shallow marine systems in hopes of inspiring appreciation for seldom-seen lifeforms and an urgency to protect them.
Using the FluidCam, Chirayath has been able to map and photograph the ocean up to 45 feet deep. With around a dozen surveying missions conducted using the technology, Chirayath estimates he’s mapped around 200 square kilometers of shallow ocean ecosystems and has high hopes for MiDAR to go deeper and further in the future.
These ocean missions also inform NeMO-Net, a video game he created in which players help NASA classify coral reefs and other shallow marine environments all over the world. He’s interested in using his technology to quantify the amount of microplastics in the ocean, identify where they’re concentrated, and help put a stop to their flow.
“It’s not entirely hopeless,” he says, marveling at nature’s resilience.
Through his expeditions, Chirayath has found everything from a diver’s rope to lost cell phones. “Anything you can imagine,” he says, can end up at the bottom of the ocean. But one of his fondest memories took place closer to the surface.
While diving in Samoa’s seas he recalls repeat visits by a baby octopus. “Every day it would kind of play hide and seek and follow me around and you could just see its intelligence,” he remembers.
“It would come say hello, then sit and go and watch for a while, then move a little bit and play a game with me. I just thought that feeling, that sense of connection with another life form, that only exists on Earth,” he says.
Appreciation for the planet and its inhabitants, Chirayath explains, is key in inspiring care for it.
“I wish everyone had the chance to go to space so you can see how dependent you are on oxygen, water, the fruit that miraculously grows on trees. The minute you get to another planet, you see this is what it could be like if you don’t preserve things,” he urges.
Ultimately, he’s invested in looking at life, in all of its forms whether on Earth or beyond. And though life may be lurking in outer space, he admits it could be very far and very rare. While exploration across the universe continues, he says there are plenty of wonders at humans’ feet.
“To better understand other life on Earth makes the whole universe seem a little bit smaller, more tangible, and connected.”
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