Allison Payne

I use technologies such as passive acoustic monitoring and biologging to investigate questions of species interactions in the deep sea. Using a novel instrument, we demonstrated evidence consistent with the hypothesis that elephant seals eavesdrop on sperm whales to find high quality foraging opportunities.

While critical deep ocean habitat makes up a huge proportion of the wilderness in the United States, it remains largely unmapped, unexplored, unprotected, and at the precipice of massive industrial development. Passive acoustic monitoring has emerged as a critical tool for gathering information about the deep ocean via fixed seafloor recorders, ship-towed hydrophone arrays, and autonomous underwater drones. A long-term research program at UC Santa Cruz is at the forefront of partnering with elephant seals as mobile sensor platforms to monitor the North Pacific Ocean. I am building on this partnership to record the sounds of the deep ocean by instrumenting elephant seals with passive acoustic recorders during their foraging trips. Prototype instruments have resulted in some of the first animal-borne acoustic recordings of the deep-ocean soundscape in the North Pacific ocean. We recorded the animal’s location and behavior and measured her response to other animals, such as sperm whales. The results demonstrate the first evidence of mixed-species predator groups in the deep ocean, with implications for conservation as humans expand industry into deep ocean ecosystems.