Oceans are noisy places, but scientists aren’t always sure what’s making the hubbub. Enter an idea called GLUBS, or the Global Library of Underwater Biological Sound. Its genesis came about during the International Quiet Ocean Experiment—a project that aimed to coordinate the use of a worldwide network of non-military hydrophones to listen in on what was happening underwater. While GLUBS, in its fully realized form, doesn’t exist yet, a team of researchers is working on establishing a foundation from which it can be built.
Passive acoustic monitoring—leaving a hydrophone running in the water—allows researchers to learn about life in the oceans through the complex orchestrations of sounds they hear.
“You can hear rain falling, waves breaking, seafloor volcanoes or earthquakes, the noise of ships or trawlers dragging nets along the seafloor. And of course you hear the animals themselves,” says Jesse Ausubel, an environmental researcher at Rockefeller University and a director of the IQOE. “Sound is really powerful in the water. It travels well while light doesn’t. So, sound is a really important part of the lifestyle of many forms of marine life.”
In spring of 2020, due to COVID, shipping declined all over the world. Drilling activities and seismic testing looking for oil and gas under the sea floor dwindled. The period provided a valuable opportunity for researchers to learn about the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life simply by listening to a coral reef or a kelp forest.
As part of the IQOE, Aran Mooney, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, led a working group to survey acoustic studies related to biodiversity hotspots. But the researchers in this group soon realized that to make passive acoustics a useful tool, they needed a reference library. “It doesn’t matter if it’s finger prints or retinas or voice recognition or photos, you always need to compare something to something else,” Ausubel says.
Mooney, along with bioacoustician Miles Parson from the Australian Institute of Marine Science, sought out more than a dozen other researchers across the world and put together a call this February for the creation of a global library of sound, which they’ve named GLUBS. “It’s sort of a Noah’s Ark moment,” says Ausubel. “Walrus people may have been collecting walrus sounds, and dolphin people may have been collecting dolphin sounds. So here and there, people have a few acoustic books, but nobody has created a library.”
Laela Sayigh, a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, was brought into the fold as the group started compiling existing marine databases. Sayigh manages the Watkins Marine Mammal Sound Database in conjunction with the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts.
“GLUBS is a huge team effort that has grown out of this expanding involvement of passive acoustic monitoring in studies of biology,” she says. “It’s certainly not the first time that such a thing has been proposed. But this is the first time that it has been proposed at a more global scale.”
The potential scientific uses for GLUBS (once it’s built) are immense. Having a species-spanning database of sound would allow researchers to study behaviors in detail and track how they change over time. They can look at migration routes, habitat use, and biological responses to human activity or climate change. For example, passive acoustic recordings have already been used as a way to monitor the impacts of algal blooms.
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