This week the Parks lab continued its tradition of a holiday party to celebrate the end of a year of hard work and accepted publications. We ate pizza and treats until we were bursting and exchanged our “Secret Snowman” gifts to reveal who got a gift from which lab member. And most importantly, we poured all the creativity the Parks lab has to offer into decorating a gingerbread house!

We get a little intense in our decorating fervor. Our goal was to make this year’s creation better and more elaborate than ever. With the addition of “stained-glass windows,” I’m pretty sure we succeeded. And we couldn’t resist shaping one of the windows into a whale fluke!

Dana wielded the frosting while Leanna crushed lifesavers to make up the windowpanes.

Jess made the most beautiful gumdrop creations I have ever seen, including two wreaths and accessories for our snowman.

We were all very impressed – Jess is pretty crafty with gumdrops. The rest of us threw in ideas and took photos as our gingerbread house was completed.

Santa had a slight mishap that was corrected via the application of more frosting…

And, done!

Happy Holidays from the Parks Lab!

-Hannah

In my ongoing quest to classify individual right whales using upcalls, I’ve spent the past couple of weeks adding in some new parameters that may help discriminate among the animals.  Following in our postdoc Holly’s footsteps, I’m adding amplitude measurements to see if amplitude variation is as important for right whales as it seems to be for wolves. In addition, I’m adding a categorical measurement of nonlinear phenomena classifications.  What are nonlinear phenomena, you might ask?  Although they sound like yet another Star-Trek-esque aspect of my project, Tyson et al. explain these phenomena quite well in their 2007 paper.  In short, nonlinear phenomena occur when the vocal folds aren’t behaving themselves; think of how hoarse your voice gets while yelling, for example.

Before the Thanksgiving holiday, I went through spectrograms of all of my upcall clips and labeled them according to the type of nonlinear phenomena that were present in the calls.  I wanted to double check my decisions to make sure I was on the right track, so I emailed Dr. Reny Tyson (Doug Nowacek’s former PhD student) to see if she would be willing to take a look.  She responded with lightning speed and we have since been emailing back and forth about these upcalls and which phenomena are actually there.  At first I was confused and somewhat disheartened when it seemed that I had gotten most of my classifications wrong, but then I looked at Reny’s spectrograms that she sent back to me, reminding me that not all spectrograms are created equal.

A spectrogram is a visual representation of sound, dependent on a number of user-defined parameters.  In other words, there are a number of methods to take the same sound and end up with very different images.  The various adjustments relate to an inherent tradeoff between time resolution and frequency resolution in the image: when digitally representing sound, you can’t simultaneously have high resolution in both aspects.  Frequency resolution tends to get better as you increase the number of samples in each slice of the spectrogram, itself comprised of subsequent spectra.  As you increase the number of samples per slice, though, the slices look wider along the x-axis, decreasing your time resolution but increasing your frequency resolution.  Similarly, decreasing the number of samples per slice increases your time resolution at the expense of frequency resolution.  There are some ways to “trick” the spectrogram into looking a bit nicer. For example, overlapping adjacent slices can recover some of the time resolution even when the slices have a high number of samples.

It’s a great reminder to be very specific and thorough when discussing your data with colleagues–especially when asking for help!

–Jess

I came to Syracuse to study right whale calls, but as Susan’s passion for bioacoustics is indefatigable, I shouldn’t have been surprised that my first trip out had a very different target, albeit one much easier to observe. Asian elephants are charismatic, huge and have complex social lives, and now we hope to have the privilege of studying their calls in captivity. So a field trip to our nearest elephant herd was in order.

Rosamond Gifford Zoo in Syracuse has what is generally considered the best elephant program in America and they have not one but two pregnant elephants for us to observe. I find any species big enough to dwarf an SUV irresistible, particularly ones as beautiful and charming as elephants. So when Susan explained that she wanted me to spend time recording and analyzing elephant calls, I jumped at the chance. As it happened, our field trip fell on my birthday so I had the pleasure of ‘working’ on a trip that I would happily have used for a celebration anyway.

A bit more luck was involved as Syracuse has missed the 7 feet of snow that recently hit Buffalo or the visit would have been off. Wrapped up well enough to barely notice the 25°F temperatures, Susan, Hannah, Jess, Dana and I trooped off to the Zoo for a first look at our elephants and their enclosure. The elephants, lacking our parkas and gloves, were taking the sensible precaution of staying inside while the snow fell around us. There the luck ran out and the reflection on the window glass stopped us from taking any good photos or getting very close. The portraits of our subjects will have to wait for another day – I’m sure there will be no shortage of volunteers for the next trip.

From what we could see under the snow, the enclosure was large and well situated for our kind of direct behavioral observations with good lines of sight. It’s surprising how well an animal as big as an elephant can hide what they’re doing when it’s the sole object of your focus and you just need them to shift a few feet to the left or turn a quarter to the right, please! We’re planning on filming them and recording their calls to be able to compare the behavior and the sounds that different individuals make for different reasons. The next step is to put forward a proposal and make sure the keepers are satisfied with our plans. As soon as we have approval, the real work can start.

We also took the opportunity to look for other good photo research opportunities and walked all the way around the Zoo. It has a lot of great species in suitable enclosures, but for our purposes the Humboldt penguins and red wolves were the most promising potential research subjects. There are around 30 penguins, which is a great sample size for any study, and the red wolves are an attractive species because they are both rarely kept in zoos and critically endangered. They were also a little camera shy.

That didn’t mean we ignored the rest and we had particular fun watching the red panda scent mark its entire enclosure after the snow had buried all its previous efforts.

Before we left, we paid a visit to the Zoo’s lion pride and watched in awe and some trepidation as Joshua chewed his way through a piece of massively thick bone. While his sister, Kierha, waited impatiently to claim her own piece, Joshua was playing lion in the manger as he lay close enough to deny her the other bone while totally ignoring it for his own. As soon as she approached, he would snarl and she would back off, visibly frustrated. Eventually he got bored and she quickly claimed her prize. This picture doesn’t quite go justice to his majesty, so we’ll have to try again soon…

-Holly