Dolphins raise sound questions

1 ANSWERS

1. Amit bang
   

   For Captain Nemo, the coral ocean depths made a "quiet grave", one that all submariners should desire; but if Jules Verne's inventive genius were to pilot his Nautilus through the world's oceans today, he might find it a much noisier place.
   
   Report after report in recent years has identified rising noise levels in the seas as a potential threat to marine life, particularly mammals that rely on sound for communication and hunting - which principally means whales, dolphins and porpoises.
   
   The sources of sound range from the diffuse chunterings of ships' propellers to the sharp sonic shocks of seismic explorers - and military sonar, which has been directly implicated in mass strandings of beaked whales, an enigmatic group of species that seem especially vulnerable to the intense blasts of submarine-hunting soundwaves.
   
   It adds up to a complex picture, and one for which there are few definitive answers, notwithstanding a long-running sequence of legal cases between the US Navy and conservation groups that has seen the latest science unveiled in court.
   
   So it was with some interest this week that I opened the electronic pages of the Royal Society's journal Biology Letters to read what claims to be the first empirical proof of the physiological impacts of naval sonar on dolphins.

   Report (0) (0)  |   12 years, 8 month(s) ago