SITKA, ALASKA
Inside a science classroom at Sitka High School, students from Sitka, Barrow and Tenakee Springs are gathered around computers, listening to underwater sounds made by various marine mammals.
This is part of Scientists in the Schools, a program put on every year by Sitka WhaleFest. Scientists engaged in actual research visit classrooms in the city and talk about what they’re doing. And the students get to participate.
At one computer, two eighth graders and a high school junior from Tenakee Springs are studying different underwater sounds by looking at a spectrograph. It looks like an abstract painting gone digital: Big patches of bright colors indicate intense sounds. Some of them swoop down, some of them swoop up. That shows pitch. But these are more than pretty pictures.
“A lot of these things we see have never been known,” says Ethan Roth, the scientist leading this Thursday afternoon class. He works in the whale acoustics lab at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a division of the University of California San Deigo. Scripps has been studying the ocean and everything in it for more than 100 years.
“Really we’re still asking some of the most basic questions,” Roth says. “It’s even the case where some of these sounds we record, it’s the first time they’ve ever been described, still.”
Roth’s research focuses on sea ice and the effects of humans on marine mammals in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. He says understanding the noises made underwater could help scientists figure out almost everything else.
“Sound is the main tool of survival for these animals,” he says, “and so basically by eavesdropping on them, we can monitor their movements, and look at their distributions, get an idea of abundance. One day the Holy Grail would be to actually estimate population that way. We’re very far from that still.”
Roth grew up in southern California, and spent a lot of time on and near the Pacific Ocean. That’s something he has in common with the students he’s talking to today, like Hannah Meyer, a high school junior from Tenakee Springs.
“We actually have a hydrophone, my dad does, that we take out and listen, because we’re big fans of whale watching, since they’re so close there,” says Meyer. “It’s a rare fun occasion. Well, it’s not that rare. But it’s rare compared to the rest of the world, I think.”
Meyer isn’t sure if science is in her future. But teacher Anne Connelly says bringing students to something like Whalefest helps them look differently at the marine life they see almost every day.
“We’ve had a big year with whales in Tenakee,” Connelly says. “We had one beached whale that we found dead, and then we had a whale entanglement that the kids were involved in with community members. The study of whales is part of their everyday life. We used to say that they walk with us to school, because you walk to school and you hear the whales.”
Connelly says allowing the students to interact with scientists, and seeing that they’re real people, leads to a better understanding of science at the very least and maybe, just maybe, it plants the seed that leads to a long career.
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