Needlefish at night – photo Umeed Mistry Our last newsletter was an overview of the phenomenology of the sound perception of fishes in the context of lab-produced auditory threshold testing – revealing that measuring the acoustical sensitivities of fishes in…
Fishes can “hear” their surroundings though their bodies – sensing where they are. Are they “aware” of this? Perhaps no more than we are “aware” of seeing through our eyes.
Most of the auditory threshold research on fishes has assumed that they use sound much as mammals do. We found this assumption to be somewhat out in the weeds…
I realized that if we were going to come up with clear regulatory guidelines (why we did this exercise), we would all need to be fishing in the same metrics pond.
Under the auspices of the International Standards Organization (ISO), we’re working on the “Underwater Internet of Things” (UIoT). Our task is to make sure that it wreaks the least amount of havoc on marine life.
New pile-driving technologies promise to tame the unruly noise of installing shallow-water windfarms.
While the ocean is 10 times louder now than it was just 50 years ago, a new propeller design promises to roll the noise back. This will make a huge quality difference for the ocean’s inhabitants.
Proposed “updates” of federal documents are required every five years to make sure the regulations reflect the ‘best available science.’ Predictably the 2024 “Updates” remain at least a decade behind the “best available science…”
The term “Infrasound” is a bit of an anthropocentric misnomer; it refers to sound frequencies below human ability to auditorily distinguish. This doesn’t mean that humans can’t perceive infrasound, it’s just that distinct sounds below a certain frequency may be sensed as beats or flutters.
