Nature’s secret soundscape: listen with me to the world’s quietest creatures

We are living through a quiet revolution a renaissance of listening to the more-than-human world.

Scientists around the globe are increasingly setting up audio recorders in wild places and letting them run.

But at the same time, a counter-revolution is also underway underway.

Humans have become very loud. After millennia of careful attunement to the life around us, many of us move through our days , or even our entire lives, hearing almost nothing but the sounds of just one species.

Fish sounds can be used to infer important information about changes in water temperature, currents, salinity, pollution and more.

They can also help researchers assess whether conservation projects are actually working.

A researcher at Curtin University in Perth , Australia , recorded the sounds of leafhoppers in Iowa City , Iowa .

Plant bioacoustics is a new way of listening to plants and hearing insects.

Naked mole rats are the longest-lived rodents in the world, with lifespans of 30 years or more.

They are the only mammals known to live in a eusocial system, with a queen at the center, like bees or ants.