Tag: hearing

What do they really hear?

Earlier this year a paper by Christne Erbe et.al was published in the open source Public Library of Science (PLoS-One) that frames ocean noise exposures in a sensible and informative manner. For various adaptive reasons animals are sensitive to sounds…

Even marine invertebrates suffer our noisy habits

Quite a number of years ago Earth Island sponsored a “Literature Review” paper on marine animal hearing we called “Fish Ears” It was presented at the US Navy-sponsored “Environmental Consequences of Underwater Sound” (ECOUS) conference in San Antonio Texas and…

When good ears go bad

I’ve been attending the 2013 Aquatic Noise conference this week and it is no surprise to me that “out the gate” we were treated to some really important information – although given the aquatic theme of the conference it was…

Shark Week – Sharks have ears too!

It was once thought that sharks were just feeding machines led about by their sense of smell – and that they could smell blood in the water over a mile away. Some of this mythology was promulgated by military training…

The Saga of the Coughing Scallop

We can always count on something interesting from ocean hero Richard Charter – as Co-chair of the National Outer Continental Shelf coalition he keeps his “toe in the flow” of ocean news. So when something ‘acoustic’ bubbles up he tosses…

Minke Whales harassed by Navy Sonar

Yet another unfortunate event involving whales and mid-frequency sonar; two minke whales were seen “porpoising” at high speeds in waters where military operations were taking place. Observers also heard extremely loud sonar concurrent to the sightings. Minke whales are the…