A new study reveals yet another family of ocean life previously thought to be deaf actually use sound to avoid potentially dangerous areas.  It’s the latest fascinating study from a collaboration between British and Australian scientists that has been revolutionizing our understanding of the role of acoustic ecology in reef habitats. In this study, crustaceans that feed on plankton avoided reef sounds; such reefs are home to fish that would enjoy a crustacean lunch.

Many such small crustaceans are foundations of vast ocean food webs. Co-author Dr Andy Radford, who is leading a major project in Bristol to investigate the impact of anthropogenic noise on marine animals, said: “This highlights just how damaging the impacts of human noise pollution may be for so many different creatures.  Chronic noise from shipping, drilling and mining may mask crucial natural sounds, causing animals to make poor or even fatal decisions, which in turn will threaten vital fisheries and tourism resources.”

Coral reefs are noisy places, and this noise can be an important cue for animal orientation. Dr. Steve Simpson is quoted in a University of Bristol press release: “The combination of clicks, pops, chirps and scrapes produced by resident fish, snapping shrimp, lobsters and urchins can be detected with our hydrophones from many kilometres away.  Our research has already found that reef noise is used by the larvae of fish and even corals to locate and select habitat after their early development in the open ocean, but using noise to avoid reefs, that is a first.”

The mechanism of hearing in these tiny creatures is poorly understood, although co-author Dr Andrew Jeffs and his group from the University of Auckland have found that both tropical and temperate water crabs and lobsters are attracted by the noise of their adult habitat.  Dr Jeffs said: “It is clear that some crustaceans use sounds for orientation, and that noise can induce a downward-swimming response. But this study throws wide open our understanding of crustacean hearing, and much more research is now needed to understand how and what these little critters can hear.”

Seven years after the Southern resident killer whale population in Puget Sound was declared endangered, US government regulators appear poised to finally enact new regulations to protect orcas from boat noise in key foraging areas. In 2009, NOAA proposed increasing the minimum buffer that boats must give orcas, from 100 yards to 200 yards, and creating a half-mile “no go” zone along the entire west side of San Juan Island, where orcas gather to feed.  After extending the comment period into early 2010, finally – a year later – NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service has formally completed its analysis process; now, the Department of Commerce and Office of Management and Budget must OK the plan before the new rules go into effect, hopefully before this summer’s whalewatching season.

Reducing boat noise is a key piece of the puzzle for orca health.  Several recent research projects have identified impacts of boat noise, including reducing foraging time and interfering with communication.  The primary direct cause of orca decline is malnutrition as salmon runs decline; for this reason, it’s crucial that orcas are not impeded by boat noise as they seek out the fewer salmon that remain.

Seattle’s Q13 Fox News has covered the story well in recent months, including a recent update, along with a three part series that ran in November 2010 (all four stories have video components).

On the Canadian side of the border, things are moving even more slowly.  In December, a Canadian court ruled that the Canadian government’s approach, which uses voluntary guidelines, is not sufficient in dealing with an endangered species.  But Canadian officials have appealed that ruling, and it appears that nothing will change for the foreseeable future.

“It’s another season where we’re allowing more stress to be put on these animals.  You have to start asking how much more they can take?  If you ask anyone, a politician anybody about the Orca they would say they’re wonderful and beautiful and magnificent.  Why is it we can’t turn that into action?” asks Christine Wilhelmson of the Georgia Strait Alliance.

Follow this link for all previous AEI News coverage of orca issues.

A few days ago, Brandon Southall did a presentation on research that took place last year off the southern California coast, in which scientists successfully placed D-Tags on more animals than any previous study, then played sounds into the water, in order to watch for responses, and determine what sound levels trigger behavioral changes.  The Smithsonian talk was streamed live online, and is now posted for viewing at our leisure.

It can be viewed at:
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/11956611

(Via Brandon’s SEA-INC blog):
SOCAL-10 presentation at Smithsonian available online – SEA Blog: “”

Orca populations around Vancouver Island won a decisive victory in Canadian Federal Court this week, as Judge James Russell ruled that the Canadian government cannot rely on voluntary protocols and guidelines to protect orca critical habitat.  The judge brought acoustics into his decision by stressing  that critical habitat protections must include ecosystem features, including prey availability and and noise impacts.

The decision, which is detailed in this article from the Vancouver Sun, could push the Canadian government toward some difficult decisions, especially regarding salmon harvests.  Declining salmon runs are a key factor in orca declines, and there is a push to limit fishing to assure that orcas (and other wildlife) have more access to this key prey species.  In addition, research continues to suggest that shipping noise may interfere with orca communication and foraging (recent AEI post); there’s no telling how this conflict might be resolved.

AEI lay summary of this recently published scientific paper (download paper):
Mann D, Hill-Cook M, Manire C, Greenhow D, Montie E, et al. (2010) Hearing Loss in Stranded Odontocete Dolphins and Whales. PLoS ONE 5(11): e13824. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013824

This paper generated a wave of press coverage upon release, most of it suggesting that the research found that stranded dolphins are predominantly deaf, and often focusing on the idea that exposure to shipping and other ocean noise is the likely culprit.  I must admit that when I first saw the headlines, I too thought this might be the smoking gun implicating chronic ocean noise in population-scale impacts, but as usual, the popular press had vastly oversimplified and distorted the actual findings.

Baby dolphin found stranded in Uruguay, November 2010

Deafness found in a less than a quarter of stranded animals

While, as noted in some press coverage, 1200 0r more dolphins strand each year in the US, this study looked at just 35 stranded cetaceans of 8 species that stranded between 2004 and 2009.  The big headlines focused on the fact that 57% of bottlenose dolphins had profound hearing loss.  This represents 4 of 7 individuals, who were deaf or close to deaf; one was clearly very aged (it had no teeth left), so the authors suggest this individual was clearly experiencing age-related hearing loss. One other species showed hearing loss in a significant proportion of individuals studied: 5 of 14 Rough-toothed dolphins had profound hearing loss (36%); two of these are considered likely to have been born with hearing loss (see below).

By contrast, none of the 7 Risso’s dolphins studied had hearing loss, Read the rest of this entry »

The VENUS ocean observatory network is clarifying the degree to which waters around Vancouver Island are infused with the shipping noise.  The data is reinforcing concerns that local orcas and other sea creatures are likely to experience several negative impacts, including chronic stress, the need to use more energy to talk louder, and perhaps interference in foraging. A good article in the Vancouver Island-based Times-Courier (excerpted below) details the findings.

“The noise is virtually continuous during daylight hours and quietens a little bit overnight,” Richard Dewey, associate research director on the University of Victoria’s VENUS (Victoria Experimental Network Under the Sea) project, said. “In addition to the annoyance of the constant din, [the whales] are likely to have to shout over the engine sounds and listen through the racket to pick out and identify the messages.” Tricky tasks, such as the use of broadband clicks to echo-locate fish — the sole diet for resident killer whales — is likely to be extremely difficult when boats and ships are nearby, Dewey said.

It was expected the Strait of Georgia would be noisy as it is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, but among recent changes is the increase in massive container freighters. “They travel at twice the speed that vessels used to travel at, they use four times as much energy and make four times as much noise in the ocean,” Dewey said.

One of the — as yet unanswered — research questions is whether the whales can survive increasing noise at the same time as they are coping with shrinking salmon runs and climate change. “Whether the whales and dolphins can adapt is an open question,” Dewey said.

Learn more at the VENUS website.

The International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (OGP) has re-instated its Decommissioning Committee, in light of the fact that many of the over 5000 offshore oil rigs are nearing the end of their operating life.  A UK Decommissioning Conference was held in October, and during 2011 the OGP Committee “aims to establish programmes to study the environmental consequences of decommissioning and examine technology development, best practices and benchmarking.”

Certainly, given today’s increasing awareness of the effects of noise on marine life, it’s likely that environmental assessments of decommissioning activities will include consideration of their acoustic impacts.  Most likely, increased noise will be relatively short-duration (in the scale of weeks or months); in regions where multiple decommissioning projects are underway at once, there may need to be consideration of the cumulative impacts.

In the October issue of the OGP newsletter, the reinstatement of the Decommissioning Committee was noted as follows: Read the rest of this entry »

A month or so ago, new research by Aran Moody at Woods Hole was published and garnered a bit of press attention — perhaps largely because it involved squid, whose public fan base rivals that of their more “charismatic” brethren, the whales and dolphins.  I’ve been meaning to post about it, but didn’t get to it.

Just as well, because today, Canada’s MacLean’s magazine blogs the story just right, offering the best mix of science and why it matters that I’ve seen.  The key points are that squid appear more sensitive to low-frequency sounds or pressure waves (such as that perhaps preceding the approach of a whale, rather than the echolocation clicks of dolphins), and this could mean that shipping or seismic surveys may displace squid.  There’s also a chance that invasive squid species, such as the Humboldt squid decimating fisheries along the northeast Pacific coast, could be chased away with noise (oh, joy!).  Check out the full post at MacLeans here.

I’ve been way lax in posting about my trip to Cork, Ireland for the 2nd International Effects of Noise on Aquatic Life conference, which took place in mid-August.  It was such a treat to take part in this gathering of nearly 250 ocean scientists and regulators, leavened with a sprinkling of NGO folks.  It was a rare chance for me to actually talk face to face with people who read and circulate AEI’s reports and web content; among the surprises was that German regulators read me as regularly as do their American counterparts, and that the Navy’s marine mammal environmental compliance program is a hotbed of longhairs, in contrast to the toe-the-cultural-line conformity many of us have adopted over the years—bravo!

For now, I wanted to at least get my presentation up here and available to those interested.  The main theme is that there appears to be a spectrum of individual noise sensitivity, with about 20% being very sensitive to any new noise, 50% largely tolerant of most noise, and 30% in between, responding as the noise gets louder or more intrusive.  My initial idea was to share some of this research on humans, and to hear from humans living near windfarms, as a typically “out of the box” AEI approach to exploring questions about why we see such a wide range of responses from marine mammals to ocean noise.  But as I prepared the presentation, it began to appear to that there are some fairly compelling indications that this spectrum of noise sensitivity may in fact be a cross-species phenomenon, with many studies of animal disruptions seeming to peak at about half the population being affected.  Time will tell whether this is true, and if so, what the implications are.  I’m going to continue to explore this theme at a National Wind Coordinating Committee meeting on wind farms and wildlife in October.

Here I am giving the Cork presentation:

You can view the Powerpoint here, or click on the link and see it on the Slide Share site, where you can view it larger, or download it.

From August 15-20, 250 ocean noise researchers, agency staff, and NGOs gathered in Cork, Ireland for the 2nd International Effects of Noise on Aquatic Life conference.  I’ll be posting more on the confab later, but for today I wanted to note the quick jump made by two of the folks I was most glad to finally meet, each of whom headed directly out into the field upon their return home from Cork.  Their field blogs certainly remind me that their lives are VERY different than mine, where the post-conference field work involves garden beds burgeoning with beets, carrots, tomatoes, and basil, along with today’s excursion to town, where I write from a shaded cafe table looking up at the Sangre de Cristos in full autumn sun.

After leaving Cork, Sarah Dolman touched down only briefly in Edinburgh before heading off to the beautifully foreboding Outer Hebrides, the islands off the country’s northwest shore, where her team is based on the island of Harris and Lewis. The research task at hand is a simple population survey, though in the North Atlantic, it’s often not so simple!  The team is posting entertaining recaps of their days on the water (and sometimes limited to cliff-top surveys from shore) at the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society field blog.  Lots of great pictures and tales!

Meanwhile, Brandon Southall is basking in relative comfort along the Southern California coast, where the main meteorological challenge has been morning fog.  He’s leading the most extensive Controlled Exposure Experiment (CEE) yet undertaken, and is posting daily on his SEAblog.  Alternatively known as a Behavioral Response Study, the study aims to place temporary acoustic tags on several species of whales, in order to track their responses to various sounds, which are projected in a controlled way into the water near the tagged whales. The tags record the actual received level of sounds, while also tracking the animals dive patterns and vocalizations.  While the project descriptions do not specify the sounds being played, earlier studies have used mid-freqency active sonar sounds, as well as the sounds of predators (orcas), and various artificial sounds; the experiment protocol starts sounds at 160dB, increasing gradually to 210dB re 1uPa, and limits sound exposure to 30 minutes, with long pre- and post-exposure periods that should clarify which behaviors are clearly in response to the sounds.  This 6-week project builds on earlier work done on a Naval range in the Bahamas, during Hawaiian Naval exercises, and last summer in the Mediterranean; while these earlier studies focused primarily on very hard to tag beaked and pilot whales, the current study is focusing largely on much more numerous and easier to approach larger whales.  Between August 22 and the August 30, they managed to deploy 29 tags and do 14 sound exposures with individuals of three species; by the conclusion of the project on October 1, SOCAL-10 will have a far more robust data set of behavioral responses to sound exposures than has ever been available before.

Attaching two tags to a blue whale (Photo courtesy J. Calambokidis, Cascadia Research)

For more on the SOCAL-10 study, see the SEAblog daily reports, plus:
This 18-page pdf summary of the project, including a good overview of the results of previous CEEs
Brandon’s Vimeo page, currently featuring 6 videos, including an hour-long introduction to the project  (again, including slides of data from previous CEEs)and a series of short videos from the field, including one of a tag being placed.

In Puget Sound, the vulnerable population of 85 resident orcas face a daily onslaught of boat noise, from fishermen, commercial whale watching, and recreational watercraft.  Current voluntary guidelines call for boats to remain 100 yards away, and to slow to seven knots when within 400 yards.  “People don’t always grasp what 100 yards is,” said Kari Koski, program director for Soundwatch, a project of the local Friday Harbor Whale Museum. “We try to educate them and give boaters the opportunity to make the right decision.” Soundwatch teams that flag down boaters who are too close, or going too fast, find that many local boaters are unaware of the voluntary guidelines, or simply don’t notice the whales nearby.  An article this week in the Seattle Times provides a great overview of the on-water education undertaken by Soundwatch, as well as NOAA’s plans for more stringent mandatory rules, which are planned to go into effect next year.  NOAA’s proposal calls for 200 yard limits, as well as setting aside the entire west side of San Juan Island as a “no-go” zone for all boats, including kayaks, out to a half mile from shore.  The proposal was released in 2009, with comments accepted into early 2010, and a final decision expected sometime soon.  See this earlier AIEnews post for more on the proposal, and reactions from locals; this earlier post looks at some of the research underway to assess the effects of boat noise on orca communication (it makes them call louder) and foraging (it may cause them to expend more energy finding food).

While it looks like it’s been on the drawing board since at least 2004, today I ran across a news report on what appears to be an increasingly well-defined plan to outfit surface ships with a new Continuous Active Sonar (CAS) system.  In the face of what is perceived as an increasing threat from quiet subs, along with the increasing costs of compliance with environmental regulations that now govern current sonar systems (primarily the mid-frequency active sonar deployed on hundreds of ships, along with gradually increasing use of low-frequency active sonar on two US and a few UK ships), research and development efforts are turning toward the possibility of using a continuous, lower power sonar system to protect Naval vessels.

The sinking of a South Korean vessel, along with the embarrassing appearance of a Chinese sub that surfaced, undetected, within firing range of a US aircraft carrier group in 2006, has highlighted the gaps in detection that are inevitable using a sonar surveillance system that is only activated at times.  While none of the news or technical pages that I found specified the projected source level or frequency range of the new CAS system, one of its benefits was repeatedly claimed to be that it would broadcast at a lower power level, thus reducing impacts on marine species.  It sounds like they would trade the drawbacks of high sound levels for the different but not insignificant effects of adding more continuous background noise to the ocean environment.  One of the rarely-noted factors that may well contribute to the behavioral responses seen in reaction to the the current generation of mid-frequency active sonar is the chaotic, and quite disturbing, nature of the sound source; this is sometimes referred to as the kurtosis of the sound (how many sharp or abrupt elements there are in the sound itself, including sudden rise times rather than more rounded sine-like changes in intensity that are heard in most naturally-produced sounds).  If there is to be a new generation of continuously-broadcasting sonars, let us hope that the sounds themselves are more closely modeled on naturally-occuring sound patterns.

For more on the Continuous Active Sonar system, see:
The recent news report, about research at Alion Science and Technology in Mystic, CT
These two pages from Signal Systems Corporation, also researching the system
A recent Congressional earmark for research
This 2006 news report on a Signal Systems contract that mentions CAS
A September 2009 Navy powerpoint presentation on advanced development plans for undersea systems, which includes a slide on CAS

Ocean Conservation Research has been studying the implications of kurtosis and rise times to ocean noise sources, especially sonar.  For more, see this research page, and especially these two papers and this audio-video demonstration.

As many of you know, over the past two years, the Navy has completed its first-ever Environmental Impact Statements for mid-frequency active sonar, in concert with applying for permits to allow them to do sonar training missions in Naval training ranges off most of the coastlines of the US.  This training activity has been ongoing for decades, but after the infamous stranding event at a Bahama range in 2000, and legal pressure applied by NRDC and others, in the mid-2000’s the Navy initiated the process of complying with NEPA provisions that govern activities that may have harmful consequences for wildlife (an internal memo shortly after the Bahamas incident suggested the need to comply with NEPA, but formal compliance activities did not begin until after a 2004 lawsuit).

During 2009 and 2010, the Navy has filed its final EIS’s on most of its ranges, but the environmental compliance treadmill never really ceases, because their authorizations must be renewed every five years: this week, work began on the next round of EIS’s, aiming for 2014 deadlines by which the new ones must be finalized.  The initial scoping phase has begun for activities along the Atlantic Coast and around Hawaii and off Southern California, including some public hearings and fall deadlines for initial comments, which will inform the first Draft EIS’s for each area. The Portland (Maine) Press Herald covers the Atlantic process (and here’s a link to the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet Training and Testing EIS page) and the San Jose Mercury News chimes in on Hawaii and SoCal, which generated separate EIS’s in the initial round, but will be combined this time into a Hawaii-Southern California Training and Testing EIS.

Using the same recording units that have provided a rich stream of new data on the effects of shipping noise on whale communication off Boston, Chris Clark of Cornell is spearheading a new project to study the acoustic ecology of the Gulf of Mexico.  According to a press release from Cornell:

“The team will anchor 22 marine autonomous recording units (MARUs) to the sea floor in an arc stretching from Texas to western Florida, along the edge of the continental shelf. These units will record underwater sounds for three months before they receive a signal to let go of their tethers and pop to the surface for retrieval. After analyzing the data, the team will deliver a report to NOAA and other agencies involved in the oil leak response. The MARUs will listen for endangered sperm whales and a small population of Bryde’s (BRU-des) whales. They will also pick up sounds of fish and ship traffic. Some devices will be placed in areas apparently unaffected by the oil to collect “control” site information; others will be close to the gushing well. The goal is to document the state of the sounds in the ecosystem over an extended period of time and compare them with known information of the oil spill.

Researchers deploy recording units (Photo: Danielle Cholewiak, BRP)

“This will be the first large-scale, long-term, acoustic monitoring survey in the Gulf of Mexico,” Clark said. “We can provide one more layer of understanding about this ecosystem, using sound to measure animal occurrences, distributions and communication, as well as background noise levels from shipping and weather, and perhaps visualize how these features are being influenced by the oil. The whales are like oversized canaries in the coal mine — they reflect the health of the environment they live in.”

One of the more promising green energy technologies is wave power: off every coastline, near urban centers, a steady surge of waves holds the promise of round-the-clock power generation.  As ever, though, there are possible environmental impacts; one of the main ones for wave energy is the possibility of collisions with migrating whales.  Large baleen whales (gray, humpback, fin, blue) don’t use echolocation to forage, so are unlikely to notice offshore installations from a distance.  They are, however, careful listeners, and so Oregon State University researcher Bruce Mate is preparing to test a noise-making system that he hopes will hit the Goldilocks spot for migrating Gray whales: loud and un-natural enough to get there attention, but not so loud that it will cause widespread impacts.

“We do not even expect gray whales to react to the sound unless they are within 500 to 750 meters of the mooring location,” Mate said. “We’re not talking about much sound here.”  Mate said the acoustic device would emit one-eighth of one watt, which they hope will make the whales alter their paths about 500 meters from the noise. The system will be tested this fall, during the migration of single male Gray whales, and be suspended before mother-calf pairs begin their transit of the Oregon coast.

Ocean Power Technologies mockup

Ocean Power Technologies aims to deploy 12 wave power units 2.5 miles off Reedsport, Oregon, by 2012.  While whales may adapt fine to the new structures, the risk of a collision is considered to be something that could set back offshore renewable energy development for years.  The current research could inform future protective measures, should regulators or industry decide that they are necessary.

For more, see this OSU press release, this good overview article in Forbes, and this post on the Smart Planet blog.

An article in Der Spiegel reveals that the environmental impact study at a 12-turbine wind farm 30km off the coast of Germany has reported that during construction of the turbines, porpoises avoided an area in a 20-mile radius of the two-square mile construction site.  Harbor porpoises are well known to be more sensitive to sound than many ocean creatures, and may serve as a sort of “canary in the construction zone,” their stark behavioral response standing as an indicator of noise levels that likely interfere with other animals, as well.

Future construction could affect a far larger number of animals than the relatively modest construction that has taken place so far. (click to see larger Der Spiegel image)

An impressive array of 76 acoustic monitoring buoys is planned to be deployed in Scotland’s Moray Firth this summer, to listen in on local populations of dolphins, porpoises, whales, and seals.  Scientists from Aberdeen University will place the recording devices up to 70 miles offshore, expanding on work carried out last summer on a smaller scale.  Dr. Paul Thompson, one of the lead researchers, explains: “This will help us get a better understanding of the distribution of particular species. We will be looking at the impact primarily of oil and gas exploration, but also the development of wind farms. During construction phase of these developments, it can be quite noisy and affect marine mammals. It will allow us to get a better understanding of how they use different parts of the Moray Firth and to understand what parts are most important” to each species.  Read more at The Scotsman.

The Spring 2010 issue of Currents, the quarterly magazine published by N45, the Navy’s environmental readiness division, features a long article on recent research by Ted Cranford of San Diego State University, which is revealing new details about the anatomy of beaked whales.  Cranford has developed an innovative technique to use x-ray CAT scanners designed to scan rocket motors, and with the data garnered there, is working with an expert in Finite Element Modeling (FEM) to model the ways that sound moves through and around the jaws of beaked whales before reaching their ears.

The results are not all that surprising, in a big-picture way: indications are that the whales’ auditory system filters sounds so that frequencies used in communication and echolocation are accentuated, with other frequencies dampened.  The frequencies used by mid-frequency active sonar, which are near the low end of beaked whales’ auditory range, are filtered by the sound transmission path, so that they impinge on the ear at levels 6dB or more lower than they arrived at the whale’s jaw.

The article doesn’t specify the sound levels used in the tests, to help us compare these results to what animals experience at sea. However, the captions and text repeatedly frame the results to mean that mid-frequency sonar is “largely filtered out before reaching the ear.”  The implication that a 6dB, or even greater, dampening largely removes the signal seems quite misleading; rather, only near the very faintest received levels that would be heard will the dampening render them inaudible.  It’s unsurprising that these frequencies are not of inherent interest to the whales, and it’s reassuring that their anatomy may help protect them from direct physiological damage by such sounds.  But clear behavioral responses to mid-frequency active sonar signals tell us that they clearly hear them, and respond more dramatically than most others to these sounds.  Perhaps these test results could also suggest that beaked whales are especially sensitive to sound in general, or to these sounds at the low end of their audible frequency range; for example, harbor porpoises are well-known to react to quieter sounds than many other species, and recent research has shown that they experience temporary hearing loss (TTS) at lower levels as well.  We may be simply learning that when beaked whales are exposed to, say, 160dB sonar signals, their bodies reduce the sound levels to 150dB by the time it reaches their ear–but they still react, even to this reduced sound.

While the new research is fascinating in its own right (and will be even more compelling if ongoing current research validates the modeling being used), it seems that the Navy needs to be careful in how they present the implications.  To imply that beaked whales are “largely filtering out” sonar sounds is no more helpful in fostering informed public and scientific dialogue than the perception that mid-frequency sonar is a “death-ray” for whales.

Currents is well worth following.  Each issue has a column by the Director or Assistant Director of N45, and about twice a year they run extensive features on various ocean noise topics:
Currents main web site
Spring 2010 feature on Ted Cranford’s research
Winter 2010 feature on Dave Moretti and the Navy’s Marine Mammal Monitoring program, including various tagging programs (Dave raised the “death ray” perception in his interview)
Winter 2009 feature on the Navy’s Marine Mammal Science program

The Center for Biological Diversity has filed a 60-day notice of intent to sue the Department of Interior, claiming that the Minerals Management Service (MMS) has been approving oil and gas exploration and development for years without making the companies obtain the “incidental harassment permits” required by the Marine Mammal Protection Act and Endangered Species Act.  While the CBD’s press release focuses on the 100 seismic surveys and 300 drilling operations approved since the Obama administration came into office (and uses some pretty inflammatory language aimed at Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar), the Gulf has been one of the world’s most industrialized ocean regions for many decades, and the practices described are long-standing.  According to the CBD press release, the primary impact that has not been addressed is the effects of industry noise on whales and other sea life; CBD point out that some of the sounds are loud enough to damage whale hearing (though fails to note that this occurs only at very close range) as well as disrupt important behaviors (which can occur many miles away). The North Sea is the only other ocean region that’s been so widely impacted for so long by oil and gas development, with West Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, and the South China Sea all working hard to join the party in recent years.

The CBD stresses that the many oil and gas activities in the Gulf must be more thoroughly examined, especially since in some conditions noise can reverberate and become nearly continuous.  While the National Marine Fisheries Service was consulted by the MMS, with NMFS issuing a Biological Opinion that included the assessment that whales would be affected, no harassment  or  permits were issued or required by MMS. (Ed. note: I haven’t read the Biological Opinion, but there’s a good chance that NMFS considered the effects to be negligible; this is a common bottom line in agency consideration of noise impacts, and is the grounds used to issue the harassment permits.  It is likely that while CBD’s suit is based on the procedural question of missing permits, the root of their challenge is a disagreement that the effects are negligible.) The notice of intent concludes by saying: “An appropriate remedy that would prevent litigation would be for the Secretary to initiate the process to authorize the take of marine mammals in the Gulf of Mexico pursuant to Section 101(a)(5) of the MMPA by a date certain. Meanwhile, the Secretary must stop approving lease sales, exploration and development plans, and seismic exploration permits in the Gulf of Mexico until and unless it obtains the required authorizations under the MMPA and ESA.”

UPDATE: According to a Reuters report, the Interior Department and the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) announced on Friday the 15th that they would initiate a review of MMS’s NEPA procedures, especially their obligations under the MMPA and ESA.  Earlier in the week, Secretary Salazar had announced a plan to split the MMS into two parts, one of which would collect royalties, with the other overseeing regulatory enforcement.

A small item in the Marine Technology Reporter just clued me in to what looks to be an interesting new line of acoustic imaging products that could have potential to augment, or perhaps reduce the need for, repeated seismic surveys of active oil and gas fields. PanGeo Subsea has announced new financing to develop their Acoustic Zoom, which they compare to a “deep earth telescope” capable of providing detailed imagery of subsea geology down to 6000m below the sea bed.  Current information does not clarify any details about the products’ acoustic output.

Most companies now utilize repeated seismic surveys in order to track the depletion of offshore oil fields; doing repeated 3D seismic surveys over time is termed “4D” surveying.   According to a recent PanGeo press release and backgrounder, one of the major limitations of current marine 4D surveys is that the resolution at reservoir depths is often too coarse to be able to focus the seismic attributes to a specific compartment or feature of the reservoir. Their Acoustic Zoom is pitched as a novel high resolution method which uses steered beams on reception and on transmission to produce images with higher definition than can be attained with conventional seismic techniques. They project that it will “reduce the cost, scheduling and logistics involved with 4D seismic imaging, including reductions in the amount of equipment, data acquisition time, as well as the time to compute and interpret seismic results. We expect our technology to become an important tool for permanent reservoir monitoring applications.”  To , read more about the Acoustic Zoom, see the these two press releases, announcing private funding received in July, and Canadian government funds received in February.

PanGeo Acoustic Corer: the arms turn to image a full circle below

There is no information on the company’s website about the source levels or frequencies of the acoustic pulses used by any of their innovative systems.  In addition to the Acoustic Zoom, which is still under development, PanGeo has previously brought to market two related products, the Acoustic Corer and the Sub-Bottom Imager.  The Acoustic Corer provides high-resolution images that can be manipulated in great detail; each scan covers an area 14m in diameter and 30-80m deep.  See this page for three videos of the Acoustic Corer and its data.  The Sub-Bottom Imager is an ROV that moves along the seabottom, making images 5m wide and 5m deep.  Both of these products are more oriented toward pre-construction surveys to help avoid surprises as infrastructure is being placed on or into the seafloor.

“As goes Maine, so goes the Nation?”  While this old political truism has faded in recent decades, the State of Maine is currently blazing trails in carefully considered wind power development.  At the local level, small towns continue to pass moratoriums and strict setback standards.  Most recently, Thorndike became the third town to set a one-mile setback, with the neighboring town of Dixmont taking up a similar ordinance at this week’s town meeting.  Meanwhile, two more towns, Avon and New Vineyard, joined four others who have hit the pause button on any wind farm developments by adopting moratoriums on any permits.  These actions come in the wake of three projects that have generated significant noise issues for neighbors out to as far as 3000-3500 feet; thus, half-mile setbacks are being seen as not enough to avoid risk of disrupting rural lifestyles.

While these towns see the state as being overly aggressive in supporting ridgetop wind farms (abetted by the fact that a former Governor is one of the state’s leading wind developers), when it comes to offshore wind development, the state’s goals will be much more welcome for most coastal communities.  Instead of opening Maine state waters to windfarm leasing, the legislature’s Committee on Utilities and Energy is redrafting controversial ocean windfarm bill LD 1810 to do the very opposite. Under changes to be finalized today at the committee’s 2nd worksession on the bill, “An Act To Implement the Recommendations of the Governor’s Ocean Energy Task Force” will focus Maine instead on constructing floating deepwater windmills on land, and then deploying them at locations ten miles offshore and further, where wind speeds and higher and more consistent and fisheries are less impacted.

The plan received an enthusiastic response from the Maine Lobstermens Association, which has been very concerned about the impacts of any traditional bottom-mounted wind turbines on their activities near shore.  Habib Dagher, who leads the University of Maine’s offshore wind project, offered a timeline for getting deepwater wind energy going off Maine. “Our goal is build our first demonstration floating turbine – a third-scale turbine about 120 feet above the water – next year, and place it in the water the year after in the Monhegan site,” Dagher said. “In 2013 we would build the first 4 or 5 megawatt unit, In 2014 and 2015, a 25 megawatt farm.” He predicted that offshore wind would keep growing: “The next phase is development of a large scale 500 to 1,000 megawatt farm. We have at least one developer interested to do that and have it operational in 2020”

UPDATE: The offshore Maine project will not have its first scale model test unit in the water until 2013.

Paul Spong and Helena Symonds are legends in the field of whale research; since the early 1970’s they’ve dedicated themselves to studying orcas from their independent lab on an island between Vancouver Island and the mainland.  Over those many years, they’ve accumulated 20,000 hours of tapes, which are now being digitized and cleaned up (to remove hiss and other noise and make the orca calls more prominent) by George Tzanetakis of the University of Victoria.  A recent article in the Toronto Globe and Mail focuses on Tzanetakis’ work, which is being posted online for researchers and curious listeners as the Orchive.  The entire collection isn’t online yet, but there’s plenty!

Those of us  who know the pleasures of cueing up Newport Jazz or good ol’ Grateful Dead shows from online taper archives like Archive.org and Bill Graham’s Wolfgang’s Vault will be familiar with the scope of this project: right now I’m nearly half-way through a 45-minute “set” from 9/1/05 known on the Orchive as Tape 449A.  As with jam band and jazz taper archives, the quality is decent though not crystal clear, creating a great background stream of pleasurable audio, ebbing and flowing from quiet and calm to more active, interspersed with moments of truly exciting interplay and melodic joy.  The audio is presented with a basic spectrogram, and even field notes (the scientific version of Dick Latvala’s show notes):

A sweet set from 9/1/05

Visit the Orchive!

The Acoustic Ecology Institute has published Ocean Noise 2009, the fourth in its annual series of reports reviewing new research and regulatory developments in ocean noise. AEI’s annual recaps are widely anticipated and circulated among ocean noise scientists and regulators, as well as within NGO and journalist communities.

The report can be viewed or downloaded as a 45-page PDF, or viewed in the SlideShare plug-in, below.

This year’s report includes coverage of two ongoing issues, seismic surveys and Naval active sonars, with particular focus on the Navy’s continuing roll-out of Environmental Impact Statements for its offshore training ranges and the targeting of Columbia University’s seismic research vessel by environmental activists.

This year’s report introduces a new feature that will be of special interest to journalists: AEI Resource Collections on two topics that will be central to ocean acoustics policy and research in the coming years.

More details below the fold Read the rest of this entry »

Ongoing research in Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary is providing ever more compelling visualizations of shipping noise and the much quieter calls of whales in the area. Scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, NMFS, and Cornell have deployed networks of sound recorders, which allow them to track individual whales and ships and see how their sounds interact.  The Sanctuary, which contains the shipping lanes into Boston harbor, is one of the more urbanized ocean environments to be closely studied thus far.  Here, we see four panels; the top left is wind noise, bottom left is right whales, and the right hand ones show that two ships completely drown out the whales as they pass through the area. “Every day, five to six large ships move into and out of Boston, and their acoustic footprint can last for hours.” says Cornell’s Chris Clark. “As a result, the Right whales trying to make a living off Boston are losing about 80 percent of their opportunities to keep in contact every day, day after day, month after month, year after year.”

From Sciencemag.com; click to read source article

“Right whales are long-lived animals. When they were kids and teenagers, their world was normal,” Clark says. “Acoustic habitat loss is a stressor and there are multiple stressors on a species.” His team has found that the whales often no longer bother answering calls from their peers. In this world of constant noise, they wouldn’t be heard anyway. “Their social network is constantly ripped apart,” says Clark. “In one area, noise levels are now 105 decibel where they should be 75.” Other researchers from the Right Whale Consortium found that the animals show dramatic loss in vital body fat: In some individuals, the blubber layer is thinner than normal, hinting at the possibility that they no longer find enough food due to the noise.

At conferences over the past year, project scientists have shared compelling animated sequences showing similar patterns; so far, only still images are available online. UPDATE! A recent article on this work in the journal Science (from which the Clark quotes above were drawn) has a link to a good video (note: the video has minimal interpretation. I find the upper left graph most compelling: it shows the whale call (in blue), loud near the whale and fainter as the cone spreads out; the red disc is the noise from the ship, gradually getting louder than the whale calls, until it drowns out the whale everywhere except very nearby). For more on this important research, see this recent article which contains two stills from a different animation, this section of the Stellwagen website on the passive acoustic monitoring program,  this movie which visualizes the movements and sounds of two nearby and some more distant humpback whales, and hear this local radio piece on the Stellwagen research.

The most recent issue of the Marine Ecosystem and Management newsletter (download here) has several features that offer a good sense of current efforts to adopt Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) and its related management principle, Ecosystem Based Management (ESB).  The lead article centers on reports from Massachusetts, Norway, and Germany, each oriented toward the relationship between MSP and ESB.  Shorter pieces include interrviews on related topics and direct readers to recent management plans, proposals, and reports by the US Federal Government, the State of Massachusetts, and Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in Hawaii.  For more on MEAM programs and publications, see the MEAM website.