I was delighted to hear bio-acousticians David Mann and Susan Parks get some airtime on the NPR program “Living on Earth” this last weekend.
David discusses his work using portable “Audio Evoked Potential” equipment to test the hearing of stranded marine mammals. This is from research he published late last year in open source “Public Library of Science” (PLoS) where he finds a high incidence of hearing compromise in stranded dolphins, leading to a reasonable correlation between deafness and stranding.
Susan Parks was interviewed on her research on the vocalizations of North Atlantic Right Whales in adapting to an ever-increasing noisy environment. Her work was cited last July in a Science Daily article where she has made a correlation between the increases in volume and pitch of the Right Whale calls as a possible adaptation to anthropogenic noise levels in their habitat.
We covered this article last year in “A little louder please!”
It’s nice to hear scientists speak about ocean noise pollution in public channels.