Scientific inquiry has always been characterized by reaching out into the unknown and illuminating our findings. From Galileo fixing his telescopes into the firmament and Leuwenhoek peering at the microscopic denizens in a drop of water; from the Phoenicians setting…
Tahlequah, one of the last survivors of the endangered Southern Resident Orca population, is carrying her dead calf for the seventeenth straight day. She has traveled more than 1,000 miles with her dead baby, carrying her daughter along and…
I’ve just returned from a week-long conference of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) in New Orleans. The Acoustical Society has a very broad remit, serving all professionals and academics working with sound and acoustics. This intersects the fields of…
When the ocean noise pollution issue came up on everybody’s sonar, the main concern was about the impact of noise on whales and dolphins – what we in our industry refer to as “charismatic megafauna.” There are a number of…
I spent all last week at an animal communications conference in Omaha and wanted to detail that in this week’s newsletter. But it was brought to my attention that our last newsletter needed some tidying up first. The newsletter topic…
The jury still seems to be out on the biological impacts of seismic airgun surveys. While there is ample evidence of migratory, feeding, communication, and other behavioral disruptions in marine mammals, and habitat and dispersal disruptions in fish – along…
The OceaNoise2017 conference I attended last week was more than a playpen for “ocean noise elites.” There was a structure to the event which drew an arc over the dominant themes of the Ocean Noise topic. I was honored to…
I spent last week at Vilanova i la Geltrú – just down the coast from Barcelona, Spain at OceaNoise2017, a conference specifically focused on ocean noise pollution issues. All conferences have a purpose, but this one also had a personality.…
While there are a number of varied species of baleen whales that are adapted to their particular habitats and natural histories, there are a few things they have in common; they’re all much larger than we are, they all graze…
It has been known for quite some time that excessive anthropogenic carbon dioxide is modifying ocean chemistry, increasing acidity, and compromising shell growth in calciferous sea life. The effects of this have been confirmed in sea snails, corals, and oysters,…