I’ve returned from Homer, Alaska where I was last week for the second phase of our Cook Inlet Seismic Survey monitoring project – sampling zooplankton in front of, and in the wake of the survey vessel…
Field Report from Cook Inlet II
Tag: research
Expert Opinions
This week I have been hopping in and out of the Society of Marine Mammologists conference in San Francisco. This is an international event and brings mostly scientists from around the world to discuss all things Marine Mammal –…
Getting away with being nice.
This week Ker Than from National Geographic asked us for a critique on recommendations that came out of a study on the impacts of seismic surveys on Gray whales. The research was conducted by an “A Team” of scientists pulled…
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…
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…
Oil industry sponsored workshop on ocean noise
About ten years ago I attended a workshop sponsored by the US Navy on the “Environmental Consequences of Underwater Sound” (ECOUS) attended by scientists, geophysicists, regulators, Navy personnel, and a couple of us from the environmental NGO community (eNGO’s). We…
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…
Report from the International Quiet Ocean Experiment
Last week I attended the “International Quiet Ocean Experiment” (IQOE) at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The founding premise of the meeting is a bit outrageous – that somehow all maritime nations could come together and halt all of their…
Fantastic ocean monitoring website!
Michel André, Director of the Laboratorio de Aplicaciones Bioacústicas (LAB) has developed a fabulous ocean monitoring tool called LIDO – “Listening to the Deep Ocean” that incorporates a number of hydrophones in the Mediterranean, Atlantic, North Sea and Pacific Ocean.…
The Neutrino and the Whale
A nicely written article in the Dec. 3 2009 issue Nature reveals how a how a neutrino detection experiment conducted in the Mediterranean Sea by nuclear physicists actually uncovered an abundance of sperm whales. The experiment involved placing hydrophones down…