This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Dr. Kate Stafford, originally aired in September of 2020. The bowhead whale can live up to 200 years old, meaning that the bowhead whales of today know and remember a world that sounded, tasted, and felt very different than the one we live in. Perhaps their living memory has yet to normalize marine pollution, anthropogenic sounds, and the underwater effects of globalization and heavy industrialization. In this episode of For The Wild with Dr. Kate Stafford, we listen to the many songs the ocean body sings, asking; how does a warming climate alter the Arctic’s soundscape? Why are the waters of the Arctic becoming louder, and what does this mean for kin like the bowhead?

We are much more familiar with the many physical changes Earth is undergoing due to climate change and habitat destruction, but less often do we think about the auditory changes happening all around us, especially those underwater. Dr. Stafford has spent her years listening to the sounds of climate change in the Arctic and learning how anthropogenic sounds, like ship propellers and oil and gas exploration, are changing marine mammals’ capacity to communicate, migratory patterns, and reproductive behaviors.

Dr. Kate Stafford’s research focuses on using passive acoustic monitoring to examine migratory movements, geographic variation, and physical drivers of marine mammals, particularly large whales. She has worked all over the world from the tropics to the poles and is fortunate enough to have seen (and recorded) blue whales in every ocean in which they occur. Kate’s current research focuses on the changing acoustic environment of the Arctic and how changes, from sea ice declines to increasing industrial human use, may be influencing subarctic and Arctic marine mammals. Kate Stafford is a Senior Principal Oceanographer at the Applied Physics Lab and an affiliate Associate Professor in the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington in Seattle. She has degrees in French Literature and Biology from the University of California at Santa Cruz and Wildlife Science (MS) and Oceanography (PhD) from Oregon State University.

♫ The music featured in this episode is "When Silence Turns To Sound" by Eliza Edens.

References

Evidence that ship noise increases stress in right whales by Rosalind M. Rolland, et al.

Effects of Airgun Sounds on Bowhead Whale Calling Rates: Evidence for Two Behavioral Thresholds by Susanna B. Blackwell, et al.

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