Today the National Ocean Council released their Draft Implementation Plan for a National Ocean Policy. This is fabulous news because the US has never had a comprehensive ocean management plan, we have just been tangled in a web of agencies…
Category: Ocean Life
What the Ocean Provides
In the current issue of Orion Magazine there is an article about animal intelligence and the octopus that is worth a read. It is pretty much out in the field of common knowledge that these animals are remarkably intelligent. Most…
The Arctic is on Everybody’s Sonar Lately
Last week we attended an Acoustic Society conference in San Diego. This time I didn’t deliver a paper so it was mostly a reconnaissance trip – both to catch up with colleagues and to introduce Gwynn, our Digital Assets Manager…
Throwing Precaution to the Wind – and the Waves
A recent IBM press release on an ocean noise monitoring project caught the attention of Forbes and other press this week because of a bit of an ironic twist: Our lack of precaution in developing earlier energy technologies – fossil…
The Acoustic Ecology of Geophysical Surveys
OCR advisory board member and acoustic ecologist Jim Cummings sent us a New York Times article about life aboard geophysical research vessel (RV) Marcus G. Langseth wherein marine geologist Bernard Coakley writes about the acoustic environment aboard the vessel after…
Crustaceans need ears too!
A preponderance of marine bioacoustic work has been focused on marine mammals – whales, dolphins, and pinnipeds. This is in large part due to the “charismatic megafauna” paradigm where big, complicated animals with recognizable expressions attract most human interest. While…
Acoustic Communication by Animals
Chorusing is usually defined as “acoustic signaling produced collectively by a group of individuals whose activity is clustered in both space and time. It would be nice to expand the definition to cover the possible purpose of chorusing behavior for animals.
BlueMind conference at Cal Academy
Ocean Champion J. Nichols has coordinated an event on June 1 and 2 at the California Academy of Science that explores neuroscience and the ocean. While the reception on June 1 and the daytime conference on June 2 are both…
Aran Mooney et. al. dig deeper into squid hearing
Aran Mooney was the Principal Investigator on a project to determine the hearing sensitivity of squid. An article this week in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute newsletter describes the research and its importance to commerce and ecology. We know from…
The economies of gratitude….
An November 2009 article in Nature looks at non-kin cooperation models in animal societies. It examines reciprocity, mutualism, and manipulation in economic terms – with future expectations, biological expense, and cheating included in some of the trade values. The overarching…