There’s some news today from the Atlantic, but you have to hear it to understand. The first sound in the above clip is right whales, just off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. The second is a large commercial ship.
(Audio courtesy of Discovery of Sound in the Sea.)
Federal scientists and Cornell University researchers say those sounds are competing and making it difficult for right whales to communicate off Massachusetts shores. They’ve published data on so-called “acoustic smog” that makes it harder for whales to find food, avoid predators, socialize, mate and protect their young.
The paper’s lead author, Leila Hatch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, estimates the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale population at between 350 and 550.
“We really haven’t gotten to that stage yet where we can integrate the effects of noise with the other kinds of stressors that this population is dealing with. One of our main goals was to start to map noise and map the acoustic behavior of these animals and map the acoustic space and its changes over time.”
Hatch and her team compared the sound output from boats over the last 50 years and found whales have lost most of their ability to communicate in the so-called Massachusetts Bay, the triangle far out of Boston Harbor and north of Cape Cod. But they’re still there, coming to feed every spring.
The best encouragement, Hatch says, would be for the shipping industry to design quieter engines and propellers in new vessels.
> > READ: WGBH science editor Heather Goldstone’s coverage of ocean noise
