This is our last episode of 2019, so we took a look back at the bioacoustic recordings we featured here on the Mongabay Newscast over the past year and today we will be playing some of our favorites for you.

As regular listeners to the Mongabay Newscast already know, bioacoustics is the study of how animals use and perceive sound, and how their acoustical adaptations reflect their behaviors and their relationships with their habitats and surroundings. Bioacoustics is still a fairly young field of study, but it is currently being used to study everything from how wildlife populations respond to the impacts of climate change to how entire ecosystems are impacted by human activities.

On today’s episode, we listen to recordings of stitchbirds in New Zealand, river dolphins in Brazil, humpback whales in the Pacific, right whales in the Atlantic, and gibbons in Indonesia.

If you want to check out the whole episodes featuring these recordings, here they are:

• The sounds of a rare New Zealand bird reintroduced to its native habitat
• Chatty river dolphins in Brazil might help us understand evolution of marine mammal communication
• Listen to the first-ever recordings of right whales breaking into song
• Humpback whales across the Pacific Ocean are singing the same song
• How listening to individual gibbons can benefit conservation

And here’s this episode’s top news:

• Tropical forests’ lost decade: the 2010s
• Central American countries pledge to protect Mesoamerica’s ‘5 Great Forests’
• Mountain gorilla census reveals further increase in numbers

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Follow Mike Gaworecki on Twitter: @mikeg2001

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