Sarasota Bay Listening Network
Ever wonder what a dolphin sounds like? A manatee? Fish?
Sound travels farther and faster in water than it does it air. This means in the marine environment many organisms use sound to communicate or explore their environment. This includes some invertebrates, fish species, and marine mammals. The Sarasota PALS (Passive Acoustic Listening Station) Network records the acoustic environment in Sarasota Bay using solar-powered land based stations. A collaboration between institutions (Loggerhead Instruments, Chicago Zoological Society, and New College of Florida) and scientists is using these acoustic data to explore a variety of topics from marine mammal vocal behavior to the ecological impacts of red tide.
Student opportunity: There are potential opportunities to use Sarasota Bay recordings for your own research project. If you are interested make an appointment with me to discuss your ideas.
Silver Perch.wavSilver Perch
Dolphin Whistle.wavCommon Bottlenose Dolphin Whistle
Multiple Fish Species.wavMultiple Fish Species
The solar-powered PALS installed on Tidy Island.
Drs. Athena Rycyk and Gerardo Toro-Farmer kayaking to the Tidy Island PALS.
Sarasota Bay Listening Network
SBLN Newsletter 7Aug19.pdfSBLN Newsletter 3Mar20_V10.pdfSBLN Newsletter_Sept 2020_Final.pdfSBLN Newsletter July 2021.pdfRed Tide: You can hear the difference!
In the video below you can hear and examine a visual representation of sound before (first 10 seconds), during (middle 10 seconds), and a year after (last 10 seconds) a red tide event in Sarasota Bay that occurred in 2018. You can hear snapping shrimp, bottlenose dolphin echolocation, and low-frequency fish sounds before red tide. During red tide very little is heard as sound-producing organisms have died or left the area. A year later, you can hear biological sound returning.
Rycyk, Athena M.*, Tyson Moore, Reny B.*, Wells, Randall S., McHugh, Katherine A., Berens McCabe, Elizabeth J., & Mann, David A. (2020) Passive Acoustic listening stations (PALS) show rapid onset of ecological effects of harmful algal blooms in real time. Scientific Reports, 10:17863. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-74647-z
*co-first authors
Red Tide before during and after video.mp4Sarasota Bay Soundscape
As human behavior has changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, so to has the Sarasota Bay soundscape. Using data from the Sarasota Bay Listening Network, we described such differences and compared them to dolphin whistle detections:
Longden, E. G., Gillespie, D., Mann, D., McHugh, K. A., Rycyk, A. M., Wells, R., & Tyack, P. L. (2022). Comparison of the marine soundscape before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in dolphin habitat in Sarasota Bay, FL. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 152(4), A24–A24.