Field Report from OCEANOISE 2026 Day 2

Zooplankton Mandala

Day two of the OCEANOISE-2026 conference was every bit as rich as Day 1. The “sessions” were “Polar,” “Sensitivity and Pathology,” and “Behavior.”

“Polar” largely examined the complex assumptions we make about things like masking, and the limits of noise exposures for critters living in a habitat that can be extremely noisy on account of bubbles releasing from horizons of seasonal melting ice; ice plates ripping and crashing into each other over miles of interface, and glaciers collapsing into the sea – and what this all means in the arctic as shipping lanes replace the disappearing polar ice as it subsumes to climate change.

The other two sessions examined how marine fauna reacts and responds to human-generated noise – which is different than the natural cacophony of a healthy ocean. There was an interesting, if mildly terrifying presentation on how various taxa of zooplankton respond to the noise of windfarms. These critters are the base of the trophic pyramid – so their relative densities have bearing on all taxa feeding above them.

It turns out that windfarm noise is harmful to some species, but advantageous to others, disrupting the natural density balance that has been established over the last few billion years. What this means as the zooplankton ‘travel up the food chain’ can only be speculated.

We are seeing a variation of this disruption theme in the natural history of the gray whales. These animals feed on amphipods and other benthic invertebrates in the arctic. These benthic invertebrates feed on the “snow” of phytoplankton that falls down from the polar ice cover above. As the polar ice retracts, the phytoplankton don’t have a place to grow, pulling the plug on this important food chain. This is resulting in the crashing of the gray whale population.

What other trophic disruptions await as the noise of human enterprise expands further and deeper into the ocean?