I am spending the week in Baltimore, Maryland with a large aggregation of acousticians – perhaps 2000 folks, presenting papers and conferring about all matters acoustic. (A good collective pronoun might be a “treatment of acousticians…”)
The field of acoustics ranges from speech and language issues, architecture, musical instruments, geo-engineering, noise control, medical acoustic-imaging, and of course our particular field of ocean bio-acoustics.
It is encouraging to see that the interest in environmental impacts of human generated noise is expanding – from only taking up a few sessions amongst a handful of academics a few years back to an entire week of concurrent sessions on animal bioacoustics with perhaps 200 attendees.
Much of this interest is focused on the ocean – given that the issue of ocean noise pollution “snuck up on us” over those last few years.
The discussions are thoughtful, intelligent, and much less contentious than they were just a few years back. The problem has been identified, and there is consensus that much work needs to be done.
While there are many interesting papers, perhaps one of the more interesting in terms of our work was a study delivered by Manolo Costellote. This study was on the migration patterns of Sei whales in the Mediterranean. Like many baleen whales, these whales migrate between summer feeding grounds and winter breeding and birthing grounds.
In this case their summer grounds are up in Italy’s Ligurian Sea, and their winter grounds are down by Gibraltar. Both of these areas are very high in shipping traffic (and noise) – to which the whales seem to have habituated successfully.
What Manolo is finding though is that the Sei whales really avoid seismic airguns – even at almost 100 miles distant, where the noise of the airguns is buried in the noise of shipping.
These findings, along with other recent and developing studies on the impacts of seismic surveys will likely have some bearing on the Department of the Interior’s current plans to open up the continental shelf to offshore oil exploration and production.
Stay tuned!