Member-only story
“You need to know what the habitat sounds like when it’s healthy. When the soundscape has changed, the habitat may have changed, too.”
Last week, the New York Times published a feature about a cutting-edge form of marine research that uses hydrophones — microphones that work underwater — to listen to the deep sea. Marine biologists from Japan, Taiwan, and the United States are increasingly turning to sound as a cheap, quick way to monitor organisms in some of the most mysterious parts of our planet. They hope that doing so will help scientists better understand the deep sea, listen for signs of distress, and preserve the biodiversity of the ocean.
“Once the data is digitized, it can be used over and over again,” Tzu-Hao Lin, a research fellow at the Biodiversity Research Center at Academia Sinica in Taiwan told the Times. “Future generations will be able to see what biodiversity was like decades ago.”
Read the full story below:
