Researchers worry that blasting, shipping and sonar are damaging the soundscapes fish use to navigate and communicate. Unless we quiet down, a coming surge in sea traffic could make things worse
Imagine that you live in murky darkness, and sound is the primary sense by which you find dinner, avoid danger, and keep your offspring close. Perhaps you are a sperm whale relying on Morse-code like clicks to find your pod, or a dolphin who uses echolocation to evade sharks. Maybe you’re a cleaner shrimp that advertises its services to reef fish by clapping. Or a male plainfin midshipman who hums to attract a mate.
“This is the most pervasive and unregulated pollution in marine systems,” says Kieran Cox, a marine biologist at Simon Fraser University, who studies aquatic soundscapes. Have you ever heard a fish growl? Researchers in Washington state did when they introduced a shore crab to the nest of this plainfin midshipman, a type of toadfish once dubbed the ‘California singing fish’ for its noisy nocturnal mating calls.Lindy Weilgart was decoding whale chatter at Cornell in 1993 when she heard about plans to place loudspeakers in the middle of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, off the coast of Northern California.
They were following the route charted by historic whaling maps to record the staccato clicks that families of sperm whales used to talk to each other. At the time, studying whale communication was well-established science; early research supporting the idea that underwater noise might be causing serious, inadvertent harm to those same whales had received much less attention.
“Remember, they weren’t solving the effect of climate change, they were just measuring it,” she recalled this summer, sitting in her home in Herring Cove, N.S., recently home from presenting her latest paper on noise pollution at the United Nations.Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail Some of that damage has already been done: A recent study by Calgary researchers found that if marine noise pollution had remained at pre-1998 levels, the southern regional killer whale population would be 30 per cent larger today.
“Try holding this conversation, if we had a mini-explosion going off nearby every 10 seconds,” she says. Observing whales isn’t easy: They often surface for 15 minutes, and dive to feed for another 50 minutes. Now the research team had observed an extraordinary moment, bringing them closer to understanding the complex social life of whales – before they, potentially, disappear.
In Barkley Sound, off the west coast of Vancouver Island, Dr. Cox is overseeing research into kelp clusters. His work shows that, like forests, kelp helps to dampen noise for sea life. But kelp is dying as the water warms, leaving the creatures of the sea even fewer places to hide from the pounding, rumbling, human-noise that torments them.
Ms. Southcott, and Veer, the shipbuilding company she founded and heads, will soon field contracts from shipyards to build it – and ideally, Veer’s first vessel will be carrying goods by 2025. Ms. Southcott says the company already has letters of intent from prominent retail companies interested in the positive branding a sailing cargo ship would deliver.
On the noise pollution front, Dr. Weilgart gives Canada full kudos. At the International Maritime Organization, she says Canada has pushed to update international shipping noise guidelines. The Port of Vancouver was the first to incentivize quieter ships by giving them substantial cuts in docking fees. The federal government is working on an Ocean Noise Strategy meant to co-ordinate a national response to address marine noise pollution.
Improving hull and propeller design, as well as proper maintenance and cleaning, would also reduce noise, Dr. Weilgart writes in her paper. Targeting the noisiest vessels would also make a significant difference – research shows that about 10 per cent of cargo ships account for more than 50 per cent of the acoustical footprint.
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