Earlier this year a paper by Christne Erbe et.al was published in the open source Public Library of Science (PLoS-One) that frames ocean noise exposures in a sensible and informative manner. For various adaptive reasons animals are sensitive to sounds…
Category: Bioacoustics
The little things that count (also)
In the early years of the ocean noise discussion there were heated debates about whether or not introduced noise was really harmful to marine life. Our understanding was shallow and the tools blunt. Even when animals washed ashore deafened, dead,…
Bio-inspired communication signals
Of the many papers presented this week at the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers/Marine Technology Society (IEEE/MTS) Ocean conference two really stood out as possible solutions to the impacts of communication signals on marine mammals. These papers discussed using…
Shark Week – Sharks have ears too! (2)
In response to our most recent newsletter on shark hearing, bioacoustics elder and fish hearing expert Art Popper contacted us to provide a more accurate pedigree on the understanding of shark hearing. While there was observed evidence of shark hearing…
What can animals hear?
While catastrophic whale strandings first brought the public’s attention to the ocean noise impacts, a greater noise concern is the impact of the ever increasing “acoustic smog” from human noise sources. This problem is called “masking” – what happens when…
Ice Seal Vocalizations
The vocalizations of “ice seals”, a bearded seal in this case, use complex tones and wide ranges of frequencies. Yet some of the simpler sounds created by ships passing through their environment may have the effect of masking their communications…
Report from Kansas Acoustics Society meeting
I’ve just returned from a semi-annual Acoustics Society meeting in Kansas City. These events bring together many scientists, researchers, engineers, and academics who are plying the broad arena of acoustics.. The field of acoustics is a potpourri of disciplines that…
Press takes interest in historic ocean noise
This week I delivered a paper on the historic noise levels in the ocean prior to industrialized whaling. It turns out that the ocean was pretty noisy back in 1800, but the noise was all biological − with a preponderance…
New discovery of songful bowheads
It’s always a delight to learn something new about ocean life. Some 40 years ago whale researcher Roger Payne came to understand that Humpback whales sang complex, beautiful, and patterned songs. Their haunting melodies released in an LP as “The…
NYT Report of whales “self-mitigating” for noise exposure a bit misleading.
A New York Times article is making the rounds about how a captive false killer whale has demonstrated a mechanism for attenuating potentially damaging noises. Paul Nachtigall, the principal investigator of the study has conditioned the subject to de-sensitize its…