S2E2: Ultrasonic Bark Beetles

In this this episode we talk about bark beetles who navigate ultrasonic worlds and tell us something about the internal soundscapes of trees.  In this season Hannah Hunter joins Claudia as the co-host of The Animal Highlight, teaching us all about “Animals and Sound.” This season was extracted from Season 4 of The Animal Turn Podcast. 

 Featured: 

• S4E02: Sonic Methods with Jonathan Prior on The Animal Turn
• “The sound of light in trees” By David Dunn

 Credits:

• Claudia Hirtenfelder, producer and host 
• Hannah Hunter, co-host
• Christiaan Mentz, sound editor and producer 
• Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork)
• Gordon Clarke, bed music composer
• Learn more about the team here. 

 Support the podcast via: 

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn 
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/ 

Sponsor:

• Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics sponsored the season of The Animal Turn Podcast where these highlights were originally aired. Originally Aired/Recorded: 12 October 2021.

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

The Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory
The SAP Lab provides workspace and equipment for students engaged in sound related activities.

Sonic Arts Studio
The Queen’s Sonic Arts Studio (formerly Electroacoustic Music Studio) was founded in 1970.

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The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:19 Sound recordings
• 4:50 The sound of bark beetles
• 7:40 Discussion
• 11:00 Facts about bark beetles
• 12:30 Credits

Transcript

00:00 - Introduction 

• Welcome to Season 2 of The Animal Highlight. 
• This first season is focused on “Animals and Sound” and was extracted from Season 4 of The Animal Turn Podcast.  
• This season I am joined with a co-host, Hannah Hunter. A PhD Candidate in Geography at Queen’s University and a member of the Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory.
• This episode focuses on bark beetles.  

01:19 – Sound recordings 

•  Beetles that you may find in bark, not beetles who bark
• In the conversation with Jonathan Prior he played his amazing recordings of ants. 
• Want to use this time to talk about David’s Dunn’s recording series called “The sound of light in trees”. He used innovative recording techniques to record the inside of a tree that had been taken over by bark beetles in New Mexico. 
• We don’t think about what the soundscape of the inside of a tree might sound like. They are not audible to the human ear, so these recordings are an example of how acoustic methods can give us access to other animal’s life worlds, especially those that are radically different from our own. 
• Suggests that sound is an important way in which insects organise their worlds. 
• These recordings were taken to track was a major outbreak of bark beetles in trees that were suffering as a result of drought and climate shifts. 
• Recording were made with a custom made instrument that picked up sound as vibrations. A conventional microphone would pick up very little. 

04:50 – The sound of bark beetles

• The sound bark beetles make are referred to as chirps and they make it through an organ that functions as a friction based grating surface. 
• Over the course of a tree’s infestation, the interior soundscape of a tree changes. So, a recording can be used to measure the health of a tree. 
• Dunn has a hypothesis that the beetles might be able to hear a trees vulnerability which is why they know which trees to attack. 
• There are cavitation events that produce ultrasonic signatures. 
• Beetles use sonic methods to identify trees and human recorders use sonic methods to make these sounds audible to humans. 

07:40 – Discussion 

• Bark beetles are not heard but they are considered invasive because they damage trees. 
• The idea that a tree has a soundscape is mindboggling. 
• When we think about soundscapes, we think about thee things that we can hear but there are all of these sounds and sonic worlds that we cannot hear unless wee use sonic methods. 
• There is another sonic layer to this is that David Dunn is now using his records against the beetles. There is a kind of sonic warfare. They devices play the beetles sounds back to them to confuse the beetles which prevents them from taking over the trees. 

11:00 – Facts about Bark beetles

• Bark beetles are 3/16ths of an inch long. 
• They are about the size of a pin head, they are oval and pearly white. 
• They make intricate images in bark. 
• There are over 2000 species of bark beetles. 
• We tend to have a mammal bias but it is worth thinking about the diversity among insects. 

12:30 - Credits

• Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics for sponsoring The Animal Turn Podcast.
• Thank you also to the Sonic Arts Studio and the Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory who were sponsors for the fourth season of The Animal Turn podcast that was focused on “Animals and Sound” where these animal highlights were extracted from. 
• A big thank you to Hannah Hunter for co-hosting this season of The Animal Highlight
• This episode was produced and hosted by Claudia Hirtenfelder and edited by Christiaan Mentz. 
• The logo and episode artwork were created by Rebecca Shen. 
• Show notes compiled by Claudia Hirtenfelder