Episode 119: Mic Drop: Could an analysis of sound help save the jaguar in Costa Rica?

[STINGER]

PAINE: … Pushed record, and there's signal.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON (from interview): We've been talking to audio people recently. It's just
like such a joy. They go, Oh yeah, we understand.

PAINE: Right. Now that, that should be a lot clearer. It is. It's good. Great.

[THEME MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: From Recorded Future News, I’m Dina Temple-Raston and this… is Click
Here’s Mic Drop…

An extended cut of one of our interviews that we think you might want to hear a little more of.

Today, we’re talking to Garth Paine…

He’s a professor at Arizona State University who has found a way to monitor wildlife in real
time using our very favorite thing: sound.

For the past few years, Garth Paine has been working on something that might seem a little
outside his area of expertise …

TEMPLE-RASTON (from interview): How is it that you came to be monitoring jaguars?

PAINE: Yes, it's, um …

TEMPLE-RASTON: Garth isn’t a zoologist or a biologist.

1
He actually does something closer to what we do…

He’s a professor of digital sound and interactive media …

PAINE: … and also of music composition, uh, in Arizona State University Schools of Arts, Media
and Engineering and the School of Music.

TEMPLE-RASTON: In other words, a guy after our own hearts… an audio person.

And we called him up because he is trying to use audio in a very untraditional way: as a kind of
sonic alarm system that could save endangered animals from poachers.

For years, people trying to prevent the killing of animals in nature preserves have had the data
they need after the fact…

After the gunshots have happened…

They hear that low frequency energy of a rifle on some recording they retrieve months after it
happens.

Garth Paine says he has a way to make that all happen much, much faster.

We’ll explain.

Stay with us.

And by the way there are some gunshots in this episode.

________

2
[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is a musical work Garth Paine composed in 2014 called “Becoming
Desert.”

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: It reminds me of that music that helps you sleep, but instead of a
thunderstorm or ocean waves crashing on the shore, he has animals make unexpected
cameos…

A buzz here…

[BUZZ]

TEMPLE-RASTON: A chirp there.

[CHIRP]

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Garth has been doing this kind of work for decades.

Recording everything from Pacific Tree Frogs in California’s Sequoia National Forest…

[FIELD RECORDING]

And sirens wailing at the Columbus Day Parade in New York City.

3
[FIELD RECORDING]

TEMPLE-RASTON: This expertise is how Garth ended up on a project to protect South America’s
biggest cat …

PAINE: The jaguar …

The jaguar.

[SFX: JAGUAR SNARL]

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: In our episode on Tuesday we talked about how for the longest time, the
monitoring of endangered species in real-time was considered the Holy Grail of conservation…

Researchers wanted a way to quickly process the information microphones might pick up in the
jungle…

So rangers could move in when they hear a sound that isn’t supposed to be there… and stop
poachers before they strike.

So, we were pretty surprised when Garth told us that he’s been doing some of this real-time
wildlife monitoring … for some time now.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: It all started about five or six years ago, when Garth was talking to another
professor at ASU, a wildlife ecologist named Jan Schipper …

4
PAINE: Who was then the Director of Conservation at the Phoenix Zoo …

TEMPLE-RASTON:And Jan was telling Garth about a project he was working on …

PAINE: Building jaguar corridors in Costa Rica to help the very small population, endangered
population of jaguar there.

TEMPLE-RASTON:These jaguar corridors Jan was helping build are essentially strips of
protected land that allow wildlife to travel without having contact with humans.

At least … that’s how it was supposed to work.

But … Jan told Garth that he was having trouble with the project because poachers kept
sneaking into the corridors.

PAINE: I mean, poaching is a massive problem in Costa Rica, we know that historically four to
five jaguars have been taken from this region every year. Their populations are now
endangered. So protecting the existing jaguars is you know, a major priority.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Jaguars are considered ‘near threatened’ by the International Union for
Conservation of Nature, which has a red list of Threatened Species.

TEMPLE-RASTON (from interview): Do people want Jaguar skin or Teeth or, I mean, when, you
know, they're poaching elephants for their tusks, why do they poach jaguar?

PAINE: Right. So a, a jaguar coat might get $20,000 …

TEMPLE-RASTON: What’s so prized about a jaguars’ coat?

5
Well, if you know your big cats, you know the jaguar is kind of tawny colored and has these
spots…

They’re actually rosettes… re distinguished by a black, interrupted outer ring;

The the jaguars coat color is at the center of each spot which is punctuated by a black dot

So the fur is beautiful and prized by the wealthy. So for people struggling to make ends meet…

PAINE: the return for the risk is extremely high for those people who might poach and get the
skins and are able then to sell them.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Initially, the Jaguar Corridor Project tried to deter poachers with something
called camera traps…

They are cameras that sense movement and snap a picture.

But people who weren’t supposed to be in the park after hours had a simple workaround.

PAINE: they would see the cameras — because the cameras needed to be within eyesight in
order to get photographs — and destroy them.

TEMPLE-RASTON: But Garth thought what if a surveillance system wasn’t a photograph, but a
sound…

And the microphones that would capture those sounds were hidden…
PAINE: We could put those devices much further up trees and out of the way. And so that's how
that project started.

6
[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: So to make his audio trap work, Garth needed a few things…

Something that was small and lightweight enough to put up into a tree but could still
communicate over a vast distance and run on a solar battery.

PAINE: We needed them to be, fundamentally real time, so that there was no human
intervention required in the notification of the gunshot.

TEMPLE-RASTON:Like a wiretap, but in the jungle…

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Garth says the sound of a gunshot can go a long way toward helping rangers
identify poachers or that someone is in the jungle who shouldn’t be… because gunfire has a
distinctive sonic signature.

[GUNSHOT]

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s why a gunshot, to our human ear, sounds different from, say … a
branch breaking.

[BRANCH BREAKING]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Or a clap of thunder.

[THUNDER]

7
PAINE: Our perceptual abilities are extraordinary, right? I mean, if we hear a gunshot go off a
mile away, we pretty much know what that is. Particularly in a, in a natural preserve, um, where
there's just no other sound like it.

TEMPLE-RASTON:But for technology to help… so you don’t have to have a human with their ear
to the jungle all the time… technology has to be taught.

This is a gunshot… this is a gunshot… this is not a gunshot.

So Garth decided to attach a little microprocessor to a microphone and put it in a box with a
battery and an antenna to see what it could detect and now fast.

PAINE: when a gunshot goes off, it's very loud. There's a subsonic boom and a lot of low
frequency energy …

TEMPLE-RASTON: And the microprocessor inside that little treetop box, which Garth calls a
‘node’ … got pretty good at identifying a gunshot…

Once the mode had heard it, it sent word out, via a low-powered wireless transmission system
which then went to a network gateway so it could tell the rangers…

PAINE: And then those gateways send the data out using cell coverage from that location.

Which then sends a message to a ranger's phone.

[PHONE SOUND]

TEMPLE-RASTON: All of this happens really quickly, and Garth says it is really accurate but it
has some limitations…

8
PAINE: At the moment, all of the nodes need to be able to see a gateway.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The system functions sort of like the wifi range extender you might use at
home. And one of the limitations is that there has to be a clear shot between the nodes that
collect the gunshot data. He’s testing other systems that don’t need any line of sight.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Then, there are other challenges that Garth is hoping he’ll be able to solve in
the future … using artificial intelligence.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: For example … there are all these ever-changing variables that can interfere
with the detection system …

The kind of weapons people are using… or the weather. And this, Garth Paine says, is where AI
comes in by ingesting tons of data and finding patterns. Like maybe hunters don’t like to come
out when it is raining…

PAINE: We expect in the future to build some, uh, machine learning in the back end so we could
Develop a predictive algorithm to say that it's likely they'll be hunting in this region or this
region, um, on certain days so that the patrols can be pre positioned for, uh, that probability.

TEMPLE-RASTON (from interview): Yeah because humans have patterns, You can take those
patterns, put them in and say, okay, we'll put rangers here.

PAINE: Yeah, exactly. It gives us the potential to start thinking about predictive algorithms that
would help position those human forces in advance of likely poaching.

9
TEMPLE-RASTON: To hear Garth tell it … he would already be using AI … if it weren’t for one
problem …

TEMPLE-RASTON (from interview): Now you said that you initially weren't using machine
learning and now it may be something that you fold in. Why weren't you using it? Was it, did it
just require too much computing power?

PAINE: Right. So, uh, machine learning is computational heavy. Um, so you, you know, you have
to do a lot of. throw a lot of energy at it, basically. So, uh, one of the really big challenges here
is to have Very lightweight power and computational, um, use so that we can maintain them
with small solar panels, uh, You know, remotely over long periods. Um, and it's only in the last
couple of years that some boards have become available that, uh, we can do machine learning
on, uh, that'll run in the kind of power range that we, that we need.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Still, Garth is optimistic that what once seemed like an insurmountable
problem is now a solvable one.

TEMPLE-RASTON (from interview): Do you think five years from now, this is going to be a solved
problem where we’re going to be able to not only have real time monitoring, but also have the
kind of intelligence you need to get to this idea of prevention?

PAINE: I hope so. Yeah.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: From Recorded Future News, this has been Mic Drop. It was produced by Cat
Schuknecht and Sean Powers. I’m Dina Temple-Raston.
We’ll be back on Tuesday with an all-new episode of Click Here. Have a great weekend.

10