Cross the Line Between Air and Water

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ross the line between air and water, quality and underwater noise around the Where I work and you enter a very different world. Gulf of Trieste in the Adriatic. The gulf is The air can be completely silent, but a busy shipping area, so most of what we Antonio Codarin listen below the sea’s surface and record is the low, continuous noise of ship your ears fill with sound. traffic. But we can also hear the beating CHere, I’m listening to a colleague using a sounds of drum fish, the ‘pops’ of damsel wireless acoustic signal to trigger the release fish as they communicate with partners, and of an underwater noise-monitoring buoy the snapping claws of pistol shrimp. moored to the sea bed. When the buoy floats Growing up by the sea, I was intrigued by to the surface, we retrieve its data. It is one all the sounds I could hear when I ducked of nine being used to continuously record beneath the waves. For my master’s thesis, underwater noise for a year in the northern colleagues and I recorded noise in the Gulf Adriatic Sea between Italy and Croatia. The of Trieste and showed that the hearing devices are part of the Soundscape project, sensitivity of fish there was reduced when we which launched in 2019 and is funded mainly played them the recording in our laboratory. by the European Commission. Now our main questions concern the effects Underwater noise was in the European of underwater noise at the population scale. Commission’s 2008 Marine Strategy It’s sunny in this picture, and we try Framework Directive for protecting the to organize monitoring around the best ocean environment. We know that noise possible weather. But sometimes we just can affect marine species, but no one has have to get wet. extensive baseline data on underwater sound levels. Soundscape aims to fill this Antonio Codarin is a marine biologist knowledge gap by developing a planning with the Regional Environmental Protection Photographed for Nature by tool for underwater noise management. Agency of Friuli Venezia Giulia. Interview by Rocco Ceselin. As a marine biologist, I monitor water James Mitchell Crow.