This is one of those “how do you put the toothpaste back into the tube?” situations – at a global scale…
A Big new source of noise in the sea…
Tag: whale
Fish Ears and Whale Songs: Presentation in Bodega Bay
This coming Friday, November 9, I will be giving a presentation on marine bio-acoustics at the Bodega Bay Community Center. Come hear the beasts of the deep sing, burp, chatter, clatter, and squeal their unusual sounds. Then try to figure…
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…
Shipping noise correlated to stress in whales
A recent paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society correlates shipping noise with stress levels in baleen whales. Heretofore this has been a difficult assumption to prove because we do not have any baseline of whale stress levels prior…
Mass Sperm Whale Stranding in Italy
Between December 10 and 11 seven sperm whales washed ashore on the Italian Gargano Peninsula. It has taken a few days to sort through the data and speculations. Necropsies are being performed by Sandro Mazzariol of Padova University. Mass strandings…
Come Visit the Whales of San Ignacio Lagoon!
We are gathering participants for our annual trip to the whale lagoons of Baja California! If you are not familiar with this wonderful phenomenon, it is an opportunity to “get up close and personal” with these iconic, majestic, and playful…
Acoustic Harassment Devices potential cause for whale strandings
In response to our last article on noise impacts on terrestrial animals, OCR Board Member Seven Lutz sent out this London Times Online article about an increase in bottlenose whales stranding in Whales and Scotland. One potential cause indicated in…
Hanalei Bay melon headed whale stranding not a “lunar” event.
OCR board members and Acoustic Ecology director Jim Cummings sent a follow-up article on the 2004 Hanalei Bay melon headed whale “embayment” citing a paper by Bob Brownell which put the “lunar connection” of this event to rest. Jim’s blog…
Report from the May 2009 Acoustics Society meeting
“Thrilling” is not a word I thought I would ever use in describing an Acoustical Society meeting, but there were moments last week that bordered on just that. Driving this is an intersection of rapidly increasing computer processing power and…