New online listening experience invites public into the underwater world of dolphins

The newly launched Sarasota Bay Listening Network (SBLN) website connects the public with the sounds of the bay and a long-term resident bottlenose dolphin community

Brookfield Zoo

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The Sarasota Bay Listening Network (SBLN) uses hydrophones (underwater microphones) at 20 shore-based listening stations to continuously record underwater sounds in and around the Sarasota Bay estuary. The network has collected more than 500,000 hours of acoustic recordings since 2017, capturing sounds of bottlenose dolphins, manatees, fish and invertebrates, along with vessel traffic, weather and other features of the bay soundscape. 

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Credit: Photos/video taken by Brookfield Zoo Chicago’s Sarasota Dolphin Research Program under National Marine Fisheries Service Scientific Research Permits.

Brookfield, IL—What does Sarasota Bay sound like beneath the surface? A new interactive website from Brookfield Zoo Chicago’s Sarasota Dolphin Research Program (SDRP), developed by Loggerhead Instruments Inc., gives anyone, anywhere, the opportunity to listen beneath the surface and get to know the marine life of the bay in a new way—through sound, the same sense dolphins rely on to navigate their environment and connect with the world around them.

The website brings the Sarasota Bay Listening Network (SBLN) to the public. Led by SDRP, SBLN is a collaborative passive acoustic monitoring program that uses hydrophones (underwater microphones) at 20 shore-based listening stations to continuously record underwater sounds in and around the Sarasota Bay estuary. The network has collected more than 500,000 hours of acoustic recordings since 2017, capturing sounds of bottlenose dolphins, manatees, fish and invertebrates, along with vessel traffic, weather and other features of the bay soundscape.

Visitors can click through a map of the bay, listen live to underwater audio and get to know individual dolphins. The website features profiles for more than 100 individuals that can be acoustically identified by the SBLN in near-real time via their individually-specific signature whistle “names.” The profiles include recent acoustic detections that can be viewed and listened to, photos, fun facts, links to relatives’ profiles and a map showing where individuals have recently been detected. Drawing on decades of SDRP research, the new SBLN website opens a more personal window into marine life.

SBLN is one of two underwater acoustic monitoring networks that form the Sarasota Passive Acoustic Listening Stations (PALS) Network. Its sister acoustic network, the Sarasota Coast Acoustic Network (SCAN), listens for acoustically tagged sharks, rays, fish and gastropods. Together, SBLN and SCAN provide valuable information about animal ranging patterns, habitat use and behavior, as well as insights into the health of the broader ecosystem. Visitors to the SBLN website can see summaries of SCAN species detections at 14 SBLN stations where SCAN acoustic receivers are also deployed. 

“Sarasota Bay is a thriving ecosystem, and listening to its soundscapes allows us to follow wildlife over time and understand how animals respond to red tides, vessel traffic and other changes,” said Dr. Katie McHugh, director of SDRP. “Those insights help guide conservation decisions. By sharing these sounds online, we are giving people a new way to experience the bay and connect with its wildlife.” 

The individual dolphin experience is made possible by more than 56 years of collaborative research on Sarasota Bay’s resident bottlenose dolphin community and a long-term archive of signature-whistle recordings called the Sarasota Dolphin Whistle Database (SDWD). The SDWD is a unique resource managed by long-time SDRP collaborators at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (USA), Aarhus University (Denmark), University of St Andrews (Scotland) and Cetacean Communication Research (USA). 

“Sound is central to how dolphins experience the world. They whistle, click and buzz as they navigate, communicate and hunt. Each dolphin develops a signature whistle as a calf and keeps it throughout life, creating an individually learned call that functions much like a name,” explained McHugh. “By matching those whistles to validated recordings collected through decades of SDRP research, we can identify individual dolphins and learn more about how they use Sarasota Bay.” 

SBLN offers a level of individual dolphin identification not available through other passive acoustic monitoring platforms. A machine-learning tool identifies possible signature whistle matches by comparing with known signature whistles from the SDWD. Researchers continue to review and refine the system as more data becomes available, supporting broader efforts to automate individual dolphin identification while maintaining human review of the detections.

Future website updates are expected to expand the number of individual dolphins represented and add more ways to interpret the bay’s broader soundscape, including noise from vessel traffic. As the network’s capabilities grow, the website will offer an even deeper dive into the marine life of Sarasota Bay.

The Sarasota Bay Listening Network website is now available at sbln.sarasotadolphin.org. More information about the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program is available at sarasotadolphin.org.

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Media Note: B-roll, photos and corresponding credit requirements for media use are available for download here. Journalists interested in interviews with the SDRP team and its collaborators should contact Zoo PR Director Julianne Olivo at julianne.olivo@brookfieldzoo.org or 708-688-8351.

About Brookfield Zoo Chicago: Connect. Care. Conserve.
Since 1934, Brookfield Zoo Chicago has been a global leader in animal well-being and conservation, inspiring conservation leadership by connecting people with wildlife and nature. The Zoo is a private nonprofit organization that operates on 235 acres of land owned by the Forest Preserves of Cook County and is home to more than 3,500 animals representing over 500 species—including many of Earth’s most endangered. Brookfield Zoo Chicago was the first zoo in the world to be Humane Certified™ by the American Humane Society for the care and welfare of its animals, and is an accredited member of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums, and ArbNet. For more information, visit brookfieldzoo.org or follow @BrookfieldZoo on Instagram, Facebook and Threads. 

About the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program 
The Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, operated by Brookfield Zoo Chicago, conducts the world’s longest-running study of a wild dolphin population. Since 1970, the program has conducted research on the resident bottlenose dolphin community in Sarasota Bay, Florida, providing critical insights into dolphin behavior, health, life history, social structure, ecology, and conservation. For more information, visit sarasotadolphin.org.

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Subject of Research

Animals

The Sarasota Bay Listening Network is a new interactive website from Brookfield Zoo Chicago’s Sarasota Dolphin Research Program (SDRP) that gives anyone, anywhere, the opportunity to listen beneath the surface and get to know the marine life of the bay in a new way—through sound, the same sense dolphins rely on to navigate their environment and connect with the world around them.

Credit

Brookfield Zoo Chicago's Sarasota Bay Research Program

 

Elephants found to be increasingly isolated, leading to fractured social networks

With a troubling decline in the population, researchers warn of a tipping point for the highly social animals

University of California - San Diego

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UC San Diego researchers studied more than 400 elephants at the Udawalawe National Park in Sri Lanka.

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Credit: Credit: Udawalawe Elephant Research Project, CC BY-ND

Humans and many other social animals thrive in well-established community networks. Asian elephants are one example of a species that flourishes in groups that work together to access food and care for their young, among other social bonds.

University of California San Diego scientists in the School of Biological Sciences studying the intricacies of Asian elephant community structures have documented a troubling downturn in the population of the animals resulting in fractured social communities. Their study is published November 12 in Science.

Analyzing the social dynamics of more than 440 wild female Asian elephants over 12 years at the Udawalawe National Park in Sri Lanka, the researchers studied key shifts in the demographics of the elephants that seemed to trigger social communities becoming smaller and more isolated.

“We found that gradual accumulation of losses from turnover preceded sudden change in the social networks among females in a wild population of Asian elephants,” the researchers explained in the study, which was led by Postdoctoral Researcher Anastasia Madsen from the laboratory of Associate Professor Shermin de Silva in the Department of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution. de Silva also serves as president and founder of the conservation nonprofit Trunks & Leaves Inc.

The researchers’ analysis indicates a social structure tipping point. As the number of elephants in the population decreased over time, due to a combination of likely deaths, permanent emigrations of elephants and fewer incoming individuals, the population as a whole appears to have crossed a critical threshold that resulted in a shift from large, densely connected social communities, to smaller and less-connected social groupings.

“We see individual elephants leaving and possibly dying at accelerating rates, but new individuals are not coming into the population,” said Madsen. “With fewer individuals in the population, those who are left will naturally have fewer relationships. However, the remaining elephants are also changing their relationships with each other.”

This new dynamic is a cause for concern, says Madsen, since the animals leverage their social groups and connections to forage, acquire information and raise young.

“We can probably all relate to the feeling of social isolation brought about, paradoxically, with the advent of digital communications that seem to remove the physical constraints of needing to be in the same place at the same time,” said de Silva. “But for many social species, which includes ourselves as much as elephants, we have to remember that social connectivity is very much a matter of sharing space and building relationships throughout our lives. Crucially, in order to have resilient communities, we need to be able to replace the relationships that are lost over time.”

Many elephant populations are already impacted through deaths resulting from poaching and conflicts with humans. Other contributing factors may be disruptions in habitat connectivity and less food available for the elephants as ecological conditions change across the 119-square-mile park and surroundings.

The new social fracturing structure observed by the scientists may not be easily repaired, the researchers warn.

“In general, we need to be more aware of these types of tipping points where we see sudden shifts after changes have been slowly building up,” said Madsen. “Once we move past the tipping point, it’s much harder to go back to previous states.”

The new findings will serve future studies seeking to understand shifts in animal society structures, how to detect such tranformations and the factors responsible for vulnerabilities. The study also stimulates ongoing discussions for conserving elephant populations as humans expand into areas where elephants historically thrived.

“We are gaining more evidence that studying social patterns is an important tool for us to see when things are going wrong in natural populations and, hopefully, to be able to do something about it,” said Madsen.

Asian elephants thrive in groups that work together to access food and care for their young.

The new findings serve future studies seeking to understand shifts in animal society structures.

Credit

Udawalawe Elephant Research Project, CC BY-ND

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.aef6714

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Increased demographic turnover and isolation precede social fragmentation in Asian elephants

Article Publication Date

12-Nov-2026

Population losses push Asian elephants past a social tipping point

Summary author: Walter Beckwith

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

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A 12-year study of wild Asian elephants in Sri Lanka reveals that gradual population losses can push animal societies past a social tipping point, fragmenting long-standing relationships, leaving communities smaller and more isolated, and threatening species’ long-term survival. “Although the effects of declining elephant populations may feel remote to people living in countries without these species, their human impact can be far-reaching,” write Sydney Hope and Joshua Plotnik in a related Perspective. “Despite this knowledge, recent political decisions in the USA have markedly reduced financial and logistical support for elephant conservation, eliminated national spending on research and wildlife-protection law enforcement, undermined trust built through long-standing international partnerships, and effectively ended long-term conservation projects.” Animal societies can often withstand the loss or replacement of individual members, but sustained demographic changes may eventually trigger abrupt shifts in social structure. Wild Asian elephants form complex, multilevel societies built largely around maternal family ties. However, rampant poaching and human-wildlife conflict have increased elephant mortality and disrupted these important social networks. Although some populations can partially rebuild their social structures after sudden losses, the disappearance of older individuals may also erase valuable generational knowledge.

 

To investigate the less-understood effects of gradual population decline, and determine how demographic turnover reshapes social organization, Anastasia Madsen and colleagues analyzed 12 years of individual-based observations among 443 wild female Asian elephants in Sri Lanka. Madsen et al. found that gradual demographic losses pushed this Asian elephant population past a social tipping point, fundamentally reshaping its social networks. As deaths and permanent departures increasingly outpaced new arrivals, social communities became smaller, more numerous, and increasingly isolated, with nearly 69% of the females originally tracked disappearing from the study population by 2018. The findings revealed that the fragmentation was driven not only by the loss of individuals but also by the breakdown of weaker social ties among elephants that remained, leaving the population less connected overall. Although the elephants retained some degree of their multilevel social organization, the findings suggest that gradual population decline can have delayed, far-reaching consequences for social cohesion and resilience. Such changes may further undermine population recovery, highlighting the importance of monitoring social relationships alongside population numbers in wildlife conservation.

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.aef6714

Article Title

Increased demographic turnover and isolation precede social fragmentation in Asian elephants

Article Publication Date

12-Nov-2026

 

Rethinking urban water resilience: Scientists blueprint three integrated paths beyond concrete

KeAi Communications Co., Ltd.

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Graphic Abstract

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Credit: Ziyan Lin, Zhibang Xu, Hua Zheng

Urban water systems worldwide are buckling under the combined pressures of climate change, rapid urbanization, and ecological degradation. Intensifying rainfall, droughts, and pollution are pushing cities toward a crisis point, yet conventional management remains anchored in gray infrastructure—concrete channels, dams, and storm drains. While these systems remain essential, they may be insufficient on their own, and inflexible or single-purpose designs can create environmental trade-offs or shift risks elsewhere.

In a new review published in Water & Ecology, a research team led by Hua Zheng at the Chinese Academy of Sciences proposes a fundamental shift from static engineering to dynamic resilience thinking.

“Resilience is not simply about building bigger walls or wider pipes,” explains Zheng. “It is about the capacity of urban aquatic ecosystems to resist shocks, recover essential functions, and adapt—or even transform—when persistent change makes old configurations unsustainable.”

The review grounds urban water ecological resilience (UWER) in ecological resilience theory, defining it as the capacity of urban aquatic ecosystems, shaped by supporting infrastructure and governance arrangements, to absorb disturbances and reorganize or transform under change. “To diagnose how this capacity emerges or erodes, we integrate two conceptual lenses: the Social–Ecological–Technological Systems (SETS) framework, which maps interactions among ecological processes, engineered infrastructure, and institutions; and the Three Horizons (3H) framework, which sequences short-term maintenance, transitional innovations, and long-term transformation,” shares Zheng.

Four interacting drivers recurrently shape UWER: hydroclimatic forcing, land-use intensity, ecological integrity, and institutional capacity. These drivers can interact across scales, generating nonlinear feedback and threshold effects. “Expanding impervious surfaces, for example, can produce flashier flows, greater pollutant delivery, habitat fragmentation, and simplified aquatic communities—a pattern known as the “urban stream syndrome”,” says Zheng. “When chronic pressures combine with extreme events, aquatic systems may be pushed across ecological thresholds into less desirable regimes.”

Against this backdrop, the reseaerchers identified three complementary enhancement pathways:

1. Technological pathways: Nature-based solutions and hybrid measures,, including green roofs, urban wetlands, sponge-city approaches, and blue–green–gray coastal protection, together with decentralized infrastructure and digital tools such as real-time sensor networks and digital twins.
2. Ecological pathways: Restoring biodiversity and functional redundancy, rebuilding habitat connectivity through blue–green corridors, and preserving natural buffers like riparian zones and wetlands.
3. Governance and institutional pathways: Integrated planning across water, land-use, and climate sectors; stable financing and performance-based incentives; participatory co-creation with local communities; and adaptive policies that reward multifunctionality.

The researchers called for measurable resilience targets explicitly linked to resistance, recovery, and adaptation capacities; before–after evaluation frameworks; and equity-aware governance that tracks who benefits from resilience investments and who bears residual risks.

“Urban water resilience is not a fixed destination,” says Zheng. “It is a continuous capacity to learn, adjust, and sustain both ecological integrity and human well-being amid uncertainty. Closing the gap between concept and action is the urgent next step.”

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Contact the Author:

Hua Zheng
-State Key Laboratory of Regional and Urban Ecology, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021, China

-State Key Laboratory of Regional and Urban Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China

-University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China

hzheng@iue.ac.cn

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The publisher KeAi was established by Elsevier and China Science Publishing & Media Ltd to unfold quality research globally. In 2013, our focus shifted to open access publishing. We now proudly publish more than 300 world-class, open access, English language journals, spanning all scientific disciplines. Many of these are titles we publish in partnership with prestigious societies and academic institutions, such as the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).

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Journal

Water & Ecology

DOI

10.1016/j.wateco.2026.100059

Method of Research

Literature review

Beyond chemical snapshots: AI and biological “living sensors” transform urban drainage risk management

KeAi Communications Co., Ltd.

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Urban drainage systems contribute to over half of water-related ecological risks in China, yet conventional management still relies on static chemical snapshots that fail to capture how living ecosystems respond to complex contaminant mixtures and dynamic environmental conditions.

In a new perspective published in Water & Ecology, a research team led by Aijie Wang at Harbin Institute of Technology details how artificial intelligence (AI) and biological big data can together revolutionize urban water safety.

“The future of water management is not just measuring chemicals—it is about the understanding of how living systems respond to those chemicals in real time,” says Wang. “We need to treat urban waterways as dynamic ecosystems, not passive pipelines.”

The perspective introduces three complementary layers of biological information for dynamic diagnosis. First, high-throughput imaging and computer vision track behavioral and morphological changes in indicator organisms such as zooplankton and protozoa in near real time. Systems like ROMIDAS™ have already generated more than 15 terabytes of continuous microscopic image data, enabling AI-driven feature extraction and risk assessment.

Second, metabolic biomarkers—including chlorophyll and algal toxins—captured through remote sensing, in situ spectroscopy, and autonomous underwater robots can reveal physiological stress and subsurface bloom precursors before surface expansion.

Third, functional gene biomarkers provide mechanistic signals linking contaminant transformation to ecological health effects, offering early warnings before visible damage occurs.

Building on these biological data layers, the authors propose the Integrated Chemical–Biological Environmental Risk Assessment framework, designed for the small-sample, high-dimensional datasets common in real-world environmental monitoring. “By combining interpretable machine learning, stability testing, and cross-model agreement, the framework prioritizes potential risk factors that remain consistent across analyses, helping turn complex environmental data into actionable priorities for management,” says Wang.

The authors also outlined a five-module intelligent management platform: monitoring-network optimization, ecological risk diagnosis, pollution source tracing and early warning, plant–network–river coordinated operation, and sponge city stormwater source control. “Together, these modules form a closed-loop workflow from real-time sensing to adaptive management,” explains Wang. “Real-world examples show what this could look like in practice: anomaly warnings for the Maozhou River could be issued within approximately 30 minutes, while a separate multi-agent AI control study reported 25.4% lower overflow volume and 18.0% lower river pollutant concentrations.”

“This is about shifting from reactive cleanup to predictive resilience,” adds senior and co-corresponding author Bin Liang. “By integrating biological intelligence with AI, we can create urban water systems that diagnose their own health and suggest interventions before crises emerge.”

The researchers acknowledged that deployment still faces hurdles, including sensor reliability, data security, and infrastructure costs. “We recommend a phased implementation strategy starting with existing monitoring stations and scaling progressively toward autonomous intelligent systems,” says Liang.

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Contact Authors:

Aijie Wang

-State Key Laboratory of Urban-rural Water Resources and Environment, School of Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150090, China 

-State Key Laboratory of Urban-rural Water Resources and Environment, School of Eco-Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China

waj0578@hit.edu.cn

 

Bin Liang

-State Key Laboratory of Urban-rural Water Resources and Environment, School of Eco-Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China

liangbin1214@hit.edu.cn

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The publisher KeAi was established by Elsevier and China Science Publishing & Media Ltd to unfold quality research globally. In 2013, our focus shifted to open access publishing. We now proudly publish more than 300 world-class, open access, English language journals, spanning all scientific disciplines. Many of these are titles we publish in partnership with prestigious societies and academic institutions, such as the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).

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Journal

Water & Ecology

DOI

10.1016/j.wateco.2026.100046

Method of Research

Systematic review