(Photo by David Kadlubowski)
A number of our recent blogs have been orbiting around bird and whale energy perception, and how energy sources we impose on their habitats may compromise their environmental adaptations. This inquiry has ventured outside of what we call acoustical “noise,” inasmuch as the energy we’re highlighting is not something we, or the animals we’re examining, can necessarily “hear,” although it is something they can perceive.
Most animal audiograms – the graph of what they can hear – are derived from “operant conditioning testing.” This would be exposing an animal to a sound stimulus, such as a sound at a particular volume and frequency, and training them the respond to what they can (and can’t) hear – through reward or punishment (food reward or electrical shock). Reading their behavioral responses to the associated stimulus allows us to infer what they can perceive of the signals in the selected stimulus range.
Of course this only works in the realm of voluntary nervous system responses – where the subject can identify a stimulus, and associate it with consequences. There are other communication channels that may not so easily be dissected – evoking survival responses from inputs we have not yet quantified. Geographic orientation cues, or “hunches” about someone’s character would be among these.
Meanwhile we humans are subjecting our common habitats to all manner of energy sources- across the entire spectrum of electromagnetic, physical, and chemical forces, typically under the assumptions that the exposure impacts derive from quantities we can measure.
I bring this up because – as we’ve been engaged in the acoustical artifacts and impacts of the industrialization of the ocean, over these last couple of years this industrialization trend has been really accelerating. Offshore energy projects – which used to just be just fossil fuels, are now expanding into hydrodynamic and wind farm energy harvesting.
Then there’s the rush to electrify our economy which will usher in all sorts of offshore operations – from managing deep-sea hydrocarbon harvesting equipment, to the infrastructure of thousands of wind turbines and deep sea minerals mining. Monitoring and controlling all of these marine industrial assets will require underwater acoustical communication networks.
Under the rubric of “shifting baselines,” all of these noise sources are being somewhat normalized. For example, I see this in the proposed “Construction and Operation Plans” for offshore pile driving operations, where the noise mitigation systems – bubble curtains and such, are qualified in terms of attenuation performance only, and not in terms of the resulting noise exposure levels that marine animals endure.
Illustrating this point; in an odd paper in a recent scientific journal evaluated how, by spooking the harbor porpoises in the construction area, boat traffic noise would decrease the likelihood of their being damaged by pile driving noise exposure – decreasing damaging noise exposure by 36% they say!(This is really turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse…)
We are running a huge experiment here, saturating our global habitats with all sorts of energy sources – across the electromagnetic spectrum, broad-band physical disturbance, barometric fluctuations, acoustical energy, electrochemical cues, and maybe even “bad vibes,” without knowing or understanding the impacts on ourselves, or our animal relatives.
How do vast fields of synthetic global electromagnetic energy influence the waggle-dance of bees? How does the global infusion of shipping noise interfere with the communication reach of baleen whales? How does the climate-change driven temperature of beach sand modify the gender outcomes on sea turtles? And I suppose the foundational question; how does the dynamics of environmental stress impinge on the adaptive success of any of us?
These are all systematic questions that would be hard to answer correlating energy (or “vibes”) exposure to clear biological outcomes – because there are way too many systematic covariates to pin any one on any predictable outcome.
But we nonetheless continue to amp-up the energy sources we infuse into our global habitat – including “bad vibes,” without any way of measuring, let alone knowing the consequences.