Killer whales, blind bats, discriminating dolphins, ma...(gs China. The males of the species produ...)

Narins will present recent acoustic recordings of the frogs in their natural habitat. Narins hypothesizes that the extension of the frog's hearing sensitivity into the ultrasonic range may have evolved in response to the intense, predominantly low-frequency ambient noise from local streams in that region of China.

Paper 5aABa21, "Ultrasonic production and reception in frogs: Lessons from Asia" will be presented at 5:20 p.m. on Friday, July 4 in room AMPHI BLEU.

5) BETTER RECORDING OF ANIMALS IN THE WILD

It can be quite challenging for researchers to record and analyze animal sounds in the field, because of obstructions, odd sound wave propagation patterns, the diversity of bioacoustic sources, and ambient noise. To address this problem, a team of researchers led by MIT's Lewis Girod (girod@nms.csail.mit.edu) and Samuel Madden, along with UCLA's Daniel Blumstein, has developed VoxNet, a hardware and software platform for distributed acoustic monitoring applications. The hardware must be robust enough to survive deployment in the field, and it must operate wirelessly. Wired connections are logistically difficult in the field: cords become tangled, connectors fail, and wildlife may chew on the wires.

Furthermore, the network and the sensors must be able to configure and calibrate themselves for orientation, instead of relying on GPS, which is often not available in heavily shaded environment. Using many nodes can complicate matters even more, since all must be maintained individually and in sync. Girod's objective is to develop a system that does not need to be programmed up front, collecting data and analyzing it later in the lab. "Our vision is to make VoxNet a
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