Yes they do, and with a balanced underground contact microphone you can pick up lots. Though ideally you want large soil sample box with target animal (ants or worms) and that inside an acoustic chamber to rule out external noise.
It's amazing how much sound there is out there, hard thing is filtering out the rest and capturing those low dB sounds that are often drowned out.
Now with an array of microphones you could potentially track the movements of the target underground animal, but be some serious effort.
Suggest adding sandwich layer that's non conductive but also good at picking up sound in the frequency range you are targeting - small shard of glass works nice, but again, it's a whole rabbit hole of exploration you may or may not wish to go down.
I can also recommend the behringer 202hd as a good preamp on a budget for such a balance contact microphone.
Or for something non balanced https://jezrileyfrench.co.uk/contact-microphones.php do top microphones and that model was used for many BBC Nature documentaries with David Attenborough. Though personally not used those myself.
This documentary https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16058448/ has a part towards the end where mics are setup deep inside of a remote cave in the mountains. The sounds they picked up were supposedly those of rocks cracking from tidal effects from the moon. Crazy stuff.
I scuba dive. Sound travels much faster and farther underwater. Initially, being underwater, it is very quiet. Then you start hearing all the noises: snapping, popping, and scraping. The snapping noises are from shrimp. Other noises, I don't know. Maybe the same principle is at play.
I should have used the word 'imagine' or 'speculate' -- the point is a a $4 billion dollar nuclear sub with some of the greatest secrets of our military isnt just going to tell us what happened...
They claim it was a previously unmapped under-water land mass and the cover story was that it could have grown from the crust since the last time we mapped there....
This was in the south china sea correct? and we have seismic sensors everywhere, a lot in that region due to Indonesia's propensity to quake... (My brother is a COlonel - I don't take the official story regarding the military - and especially subs...
> In 2018, seismometers around the world detected mysterious rumbles emanating from a usually quiet area in the Indian Ocean between Comoros and Madagascar. At the time, researchers were astonished to find a 2,690-foot-tall underwater volcano, which is about 1.5 times the height of the One World Trade Center in New York.
As with most conspiracy theories, this one falls apart on even casual examination.
When I was a kid in California, I came across a vibrant ant colony in a rock, a piece of fractured shale. There were so many ants swarming around the entrance that you could hear their susurration a good twenty feet (6m) away.
I've long suspected that with very powerful microphones we might be able to hear all sorts of fascinating sounds from tiny sources of life, from insects on down.
I'm aware of some contact microphone recordings of ants, such as [1] and [2], but I'm talking about much more sensitive recordings.. for example, what is the sound of an ant's leg moving (not just its footstep).. or the sound of its internal organs? What does insect sex or feeding sound like? There are many thousands of different insect species, and each of them could sound different.
Just like electron microscopes have given us amazing views of insects that were unavailable to use through the naked eye, I suspect the soundscape on the microscopic level could be just as fascinating.
Musicians could also use it as raw material, and process it to make it even more interesting. The sky is the limit.
This is not new, nor is it a surprise. Many animals that burrow have well developed senses of sound, and some even have sensory organs for detecting electrical charge and vibration.
industrial agriculture is destroying this important biome.
Watch 'kiss the soil' on netflix and look into permaculture/forest style gardening.
Guided natural processes could just save us from monocultured death.
I wonder how much we can "extract" while minimizing disruption. Maybe.. hopefully a new agricultural science emerges from the urgent need to nurture the biosphere.
My personal interest is to see independent small scale robotics enable efficient harvesting of densely inter-planted spaces which will facilitate higher aggregate output while supporting greater biodiversity at all levels (soil, fungi, insect, bird, plant) without the artificial fertilizer and pesticide inputs. Sort of The One-Straw Revolution plus robots. No idea how feasible it is, at a guess it is unlikely to compete with the scale of existing systems up front in terms of yield per acre but probably can on fiscal returns vs. cash invested in marginal or non-flat terrain.
Most of our understanding of animal behavior comes from observation in their natural habitat. It would seem nearly impossible to observe this behavior for undersoil.
I'd take an opposite view that as humans, we don't know what we don't know, and the scope of our unknowing is much greater than we lend ourselves to believe.
Another great example studies of mycelium networks exchanging nutrients with forest tree root networks. The exchange of nutrients has much in common with the firing of neutrons in the animal brain. This was discovered by "feeding" trees radioactive CO2 gas and observing how it moves to other trees. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/mec.15520
The extreme case is compost, which is decay-dominated, and ends up full of thermophiles (not unlike wine ends up dominated by the yeast that made the wine). A number of people have figured out how to heat greenhouses, outbuildings, or in one case college dormitories by scaling this up.
They used a downdraft system which pulls air through the pile, heating it up. Then they ran the air through some heat exchangers, and finally out into some charcoal and through some planter boxes to absorb the moisture and some volatiles. It was quite involved. Large too.
It's amazing how much sound there is out there, hard thing is filtering out the rest and capturing those low dB sounds that are often drowned out.
Now with an array of microphones you could potentially track the movements of the target underground animal, but be some serious effort.
Basic balanced contact micrphone how to build https://www.instructables.com/Balanced-piezo-contact-microph...
Suggest adding sandwich layer that's non conductive but also good at picking up sound in the frequency range you are targeting - small shard of glass works nice, but again, it's a whole rabbit hole of exploration you may or may not wish to go down.
I can also recommend the behringer 202hd as a good preamp on a budget for such a balance contact microphone.
Or for something non balanced https://jezrileyfrench.co.uk/contact-microphones.php do top microphones and that model was used for many BBC Nature documentaries with David Attenborough. Though personally not used those myself.