On September 24 the San Francisco Bay Model will be buzzing with activity. Ocean Plastics artists Judith Selby and Richard Lang will be co-hosting a reception for their beautiful and sobering Beach Plastic artworks show Finding Meaning in the Mess…
Category: Ocean Life
How do coral reef critters find home?
The life cycles for many coral reef animals are a bit tricky. Coral reefs are huge feeding bodies with billions of mouths looking for food. Much of that food is provided by the inhabitants of the reef itself – and…
Wavelet art highlights the finer points of whale songs
OCR Advisor and software mathematician Mark Fisher received some recent coverage in Wired and Co.Design for his fantastic renderings of whale, dolphin, bird, and insect sounds using a diagnostic function called “wavelets.” Wavelets are typically used to evaluate large data…
Arctic Soundscapes now on line!
After a pile of coding, and some deep generosity from World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Chris Clark’s lab at Cornell, and the Macaulay Library we are finally launching our Arctic Soundscapes feature on the “Don’t be a Buckethead” website. We launched…
Whale Call Map
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…
Mapping Cetaceans and Sound
Thanks to a number of folks in this august group we were sent a substantial article from Monday’s NY Times about ocean noise pollution. The initiating work discussed in the article is a NOAA sponsored meta-data framework on mapping marine…
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…
Ongoing Whale Behavioral Response Study
With as much effort that has gone into understanding how noise impacts marine mammals − and all of the contention that orbits around setting appropriate exposure mitigation levels, we still know very little about which noises (and how much) have…