top of page

From whales to albatross, working remotely in the middle of a pandemic from a farm.

By Lucía Martina Martín López


Who would have imagined a year ago that we would find ourselves in this situation? I imagine most people would not and definitely not me!

@Popi Gkikopoulou

A year ago, I was sitting in an office at the University of St Andrews, investigating if and how beaked whales react to sonar sounds. Long hours in front of the computer were compensated by the recent reminder of having done fieldwork in Antarctica surrounded by the wildest and greatest nature I have ever seen. Those vivid moments of seeing the first wandering albatross or the first iceberg; hearing the ice cracking or the snort of Weddell seals; and smelling a gentoo penguin colony. All those moments provided me with motivation.


Let us not forget all the outreach activities, the frequent coffee breaks with colleagues discussing scientific ideas or just talking about the hike we did at the weekend. All those face-to-face chats that I took for granted. All those were also giving me the motivation and energy to be back at the office where I finally found that beaked whales do in fact startle to mid-frequency sonar sounds!


Then the pandemic came. Yeah, a pandemic like in the movies. At first it all sounded and seemed so far away but soon it felt real. Despite the closeness of the pandemic, I was so lucky to be able to work from home, sometimes in my pyjamas. To be able to enjoy the singing of the birds while having a lonely coffee break in a hammock during the day and enjoying the company of my flatmates around a firepit at night. Do not get me wrong, it was hard at moments as it has been for all of us. But each day, I learned to focus on the simple moments from which I could get the joy I needed!


My beaked whale postdoc finished, just in time to enjoy two weeks in the Outer Hebrides before I remotely started my current postdoc with SeabirdSound data at the University of Liverpool, with Samantha Patrick as my line manager. I enjoyed those two weeks as if they were going to be the last holiday of the year, and indeed, they have been. I enjoyed the freedom that nature and my van provided me. Isolated from people I charged myself with positive energy through cycling, snorkelling, hiking, cycling, climbing and body boarding. I hope to come back and learn more from the locals!



Do wandering albatross change their travel direction in relation to Infrasound? That was going to be and still is the question I am trying to answer.


The wandering albatross, Diomedea exulans, is known to have the largest wingspan of any bird, with a mean of 3 meters. They fly long distances over the Southern Ocean, without flapping their wings. For a bird of this size flapping takes so much energy. However, the morphology of their wings allows them to take advantage of wind velocity gradients close to the sea surface, engaging in a type of zig-zag shaped flight called “dynamic soaring”. Wandering albatrosses breed every other year in several islands north of the Antarctic Circle, including the Crozet Islands, in the French Sub-Antarctic at 46 degrees South (red circle in the middle of Fig 1).


The breeding cycle lasts a complete year, starting with the egg laying which occurs between December and January. While one progenitor incubates the egg the other forages at sea, to gain the reserves needed for the fasting period in the nest and to feed the chick once it hatches. These are called incubation trips, and lucky me, I have been provided with GPS data from 81 adult birds, 47 females (pink) and 34 males (blue) tagged at the beginning of January in 2013. While females tend to go north towards subtropical waters, males go south towards Antarctic waters where they experience greater wind speeds on average. I will combine these data with modelled Infrasound Sound Pressure Level data to study if wandering albatrosses use infrasound to optimise their travelling route during these incubation trips.


Infrasound, sometimes referred to as low-frequency sound, has a frequency lower than 20 Hz or cycles per second, the “normal” lower limit of human hearing. Infrasound is differentiated into microbaroms (0.07-1Hz) and surf (1-4Hz). Modelled infrasound data only provides information on microbaroms which come from ubiquitous features of the marine environment some of which are static and modulate with time, while other features are more dynamic such as those related to storms. Sound attenuation in the air is proportional to the square of the frequency, so infrasound can be detected hundreds to thousands of kilometres from its source. Standing ocean waves, generated when ocean waves propagate in opposite directions, produce a near-continuous hum in a broad frequency range as microbaroms (0.1-1.0 Hz), both in the open sea and due to interaction with the coastlines. Microbarom sources are stronger during the winter when ocean waves are more energetic due to the passage of storms.

Our hypothesis is that wandering albatrosses want to avoid windless areas, as they need the wind to aid their movement, and detect windless areas, as areas with low infrasound sound pressure level to avoid them. In order to test this hypothesis, I will analyze the changes of albatross travelling direction in relation with IS sound pressure level. Here, you can see an animation of an incubation trip from an albatross departing from Crozet Island. It shows a GPS point every hour superimposed to the corresponding microbarom infrasound modelled map. Note the low sound pressure level (dB) of the area around the bird. This is because the attenuation in the near field (1-200 km around the bird) is much bigger than in the far field (beyond 200km around the bird).




And while I study if and how wandering albatross change their travel direction in relation to infrasound, I do feel that the closer I am to “Flequi” the donkey while she brays, the more likely it is that I will become deaf. I am also learning through close observation that a day difference in age for a two-day old baby goat makes a clear difference in their ability to climb whatever is around, and how much a goat mum protects her kid (apparently this is the real name for a goat’s offspring in English!) from bullying by the one day older kids.

This one of the many more interesting things that occur every day on the farm.














bottom of page