|
Sights
And Sounds Of Whales Online
In
this issue of PESA News, our web review has a look at several overseas
whale research sites. Thanks to researcher Chris Burton for alerting us
to these sites.
rorqual.com/blue.htm
This site provides information about blue whale research being carried
out under the Mingan Island Cetacean Study (MICS). MICS, a non-profit
research organisation, was founded in 1979 by Richard Sears and is dedicated
to carrying out ecological studies of marine mammals. MICS does most of
its work along the Quebec North Shore in the Mingan Island and Anticosti
Island regions of Canada. It was the first organisation to carry out long-term
studies of the endangered blue whale. The MICS blue whale web site provides
a historical overview of the work MICS has done into blue whales in Canada
and internationally, and includes photos and whale watching and field
research opportunities. There are also links to other MICS projects, including
an "adopt a blue whale" project, and a newsletter.
birds.cornell.edu/brp/SoundsBlueWhale.html
A web site with 'bird' being the first word in the URL, at the Cornell
Laboratory of Ornithology in New York state, seems an unlikely source
of information about blue whales. But if you want to hear for yourself
the sounds blue whales make, this is a good place to start. The composition
of sounds that blue whales make are described and there is an audio link
to two spectrograms. The first plays a 6.7 minute recording of a blue
whale, made by US Navy ocean-bottom surveillance microphones in the western
North Atlantic. The second spectrogram plays a recording of a Pacific
blue whale off the coast of California, made by underwater microphones
towed by a Navy surveillance vessel. Both spectrograms play speeded up
sounds of the original recordings because the sounds the whales make are
barely audible to humans. At the bottom of the page there are links to
other sites, including more details about whale communication research.
This link provides background information on how whale sounds ended up
as part of the laboratory's Bioacoustics Research Programme (BRP), whale
behaviour research, and the technology behind the study. Other links include
an acoustic census of migrating bowhead whales, searching for giant squid
off New Zealand by acoustically tracking sperm whales which prey on them,
and the effects of human-made sounds on the behaviour of whales. As well
as blue whales, the BRP also has information on birds and elephants. It
provides details about software and hardware for sound analysis and recording.
http://montereybaywhalewatch.com/research.htm
This web site provides details about a project being run by the Monterey
Bay Whale Watch company to collect data on marine mammals sighted during
whale watch trips. Monterey Bay's continental shelf and submarine canyon
support a variety of habitats with one of the highest diversities of marine
mammals in the world. This site provides details of ongoing photo identification
efforts with several samples on the page. It also provides details about
the Monterey Bay Cetacean Project, which involves work by marine biologists
and the provision of data to the Cascadia Research Collective (CRC), a
non-profit research group based in Olympia, Washington State. There is
also a link to the CRC site. Other links on the page connect to the Monterey
Bay Whale Watch home page, a sightings page, whale watching trips, marine
life and feature articles about whales. There is also a general links
page to other whale-related and general environmental and ecological websites.
oregonstate.edu/groups/marinemammal
This site opens with a brief historical background on the Oregon State
University's (OSU) Marine Mammal Programme (MMP). It also explains the
aims and objectives of the programme. It has links to publications, research,
education, photos and details about natural history trips. The home page
also has links to other OSU sites. The publications link provides access
to journal articles, documentaries, books and popular periodicals, sea
grant publications and OSU publications. The research link provides a
brief overview of the OSU MMP and an image of some of the main whale species
found around the North American coastline. The education link provides
details of a successful public whale watching programme, natural history
trips to the San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja California, Mexico and details
about the Hatfield Marine Science Centre, which features the findings
of the OSU MMP. The photo section of the site has images of a variety
of whales including blue, humpback, sperm, gray, right, and pilot whales,
bottlenose and Atlantic whitesided dolphins and staff and research vessels.
More
Marine Mammal Research Information
http://swfsc.nmfs.noaa.gov/prd/dsweb/tm-256/TM256.htm
This link is to a paper by Dr Darlene Ketten on marine mammal hearing
and the effects of noise on it. This was published in 1998 and was commissioned
by the US Government to help them evaluate the use of active acoustic
devices on commercial fishing nets to drive marine mammals away from the
nets to avoid entanglement and death.
http://seawater.tamu.edu/SWSS/
http://www.gomr.mms.gov/homepg/regulate/environ/ongoing_studies/gom-ps.html
These
links summarise recent research in the Gulf of Mexico – SWSS 2002
– Sperm Whale Seismic Study. This is the first of three years to
which the MMS is committed. IAGC was an industry research partner in this
effort. The IAGC expects to continue to participate in 2003 and 2004.
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10564.html
This link provides a synopsis of a report about ocean noise and marine
mammals. The report reviews sources of noise in the ocean environment,
what is known of the responses of marine mammals to acoustic disturbance,
and what models exist for describing ocean noise and marine mammal responses.
Recommendations are made for future data gathering efforts, studies of
marine mammal behaviour and physiology, and modelling efforts necessary
to determine the long and short term impacts of ocean noise on marine
mammals.
Back
to top
|
