- WASHINGTON D.C.
- Whale songs can travel thousands of miles, but an increasingly noisy
ocean is drastically cutting down their ability to communicate, shows new
research that suggests ever-increasing noise could impede the beasts' ability
to navigate and find mates.
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- Whales sing at a low frequency, at the very bottom of
the range of human hearing. To hear the whales, "you have to broaden
your listening range," said Christopher Clark of Cornell University,
adding that, "their voices are beautifully adapted for long range
transmission. They are acoustically extremely prolific."
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- By singing at low frequencies, whales are able to communicate
across oceans - it's how they keep track of their pod and alert friends
of a good place to eat.
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- Using an underwater sound surveillance system more typically
employed for tracking submarines, Clark and his colleagues zero in on specific
whale songs and even track whales based on where the songs originate from.
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- Puerto Rico to Newfoundland
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- "If we went to the shelf-edge of Puerto Rico we
could hear blue whales off Newfoundland 1,600 miles away," Clark said
here this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science.
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- But Clark and other scientists are concerned that the
growing "acoustic smog" in the world's oceans, and particularly
the waters near popular migration and feeding routes, is interfering with
whales' ability to communicate with songs.
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- "A blue whale, which lives 100 years, that was born
in 1940, today has had his acoustic bubble shrunken from 1,000 miles to
100 miles because of noise pollution," said Clark. "The noise
pollution is estimated to be at the industrial noise level where OSHA would
require us to wear headphones."
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- Noise pollution is doubling every decade in an urbanized
marine environment, Clark claims, mostly due to shipping traffic.
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- "If females can no longer hear the singing males
through the smog, they lose breeding opportunities and choices," he
said.
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- Clark suggested that the shipping industry overhaul their
ships and begin using quieter propellers. A more economically feasible
fix might be to reroute shipping traffic so that it no longer passed through
popular whale habitats, he said.
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- Spaced out
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- Very little is known about whale communication. Clark
and colleagues, U.S. Navy acoustics experts Chuck Gagnon and Paula Loveday,
have been been using the underwater microphones of the Sound Surveillance
System (SOSUS) system to track blue, fin, humpback and minke whales. They
find that the process of communication among whales is a broader concept,
in both time and space, than humans have conceptualized.
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- "There is a time delay in the water, and the response
times for their communication are not the same as ours," Clark said.
"Suddenly you realize that their behavior is defined not by my scale,
or any other whale researcher's scale, but by a whale's sense of scale
-- ocean-basin sized."
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- Whale sonar is also important for navigation.
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- "Whales will aim directly at a seamount that is
300 miles away, then once they reach it, change course and head to a new
feature," Clark said. "It is as if they are slaloming from one
geographic feature to the next. They must have acoustic memories analogous
to our visual memories."
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- In separate research presented this weekend, DNA analysis
of whales shows their populations grew steadily through history, with drastic
declines recently.
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- "Whales have shown remarkable resilience to cataclysmic
events -- until the last one -- which is us," said Steve Palumbi of
Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station. "Ice ages, sea level change and
even loss of local food sources did not interrupt their lives. Living in
a fluid environment they could move to new areas of productivity and find
food even as the climate around them changed."
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- - LiveScience's Robert Roy Britt contributed to this
report.
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- http://www.livescience.com/
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