Part of the noise from marine activity was momentarily muted by the economic fallout from COVID-19. That offers scientists a special chance to research what happens to marine life when people settle down.
With whirling ship propellers and roaring air arms looking for oil and gas reserves, humans today pollute the oceans. Now that the pandemic has slowed it down, watching whales and other species' behaviour is like a look into what sea life was like before people dramatically turned up the intensity over the past 200 years.
In a press conference, Christine Gabriele, a wildlife biologist at Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, said It's like this horrible pandemic confined us humans to really small spaces but gave the whales a lot of space to grow, both physically and acoustically." "In fact, I'm lucky to take this opportunity once in a lifetime to study whale communication in natural silence."
Humpback whales have the potential to take up more space and rest each year without the interference of cruise ships and tour boats that carry hundreds of thousands of tourists to Glacier Bay, Alaska. In the midst of channels that usually would have been noisy and crowded with boats, researchers noticed them socialising and sometimes taking naps out. According to Gabriele, median normal sound volumes in the bay in 2020 were 50 percent quieter than they were last year at the same time. It was so silent that Gabriele could listen to what she thought had been a long exchange between a mother and a calf.
To record these improvements, Gabriele and other researchers are tuning into a network of hydrophones, which are fundamentally underwater microphones. She was one of the scientists who presented early results from their study today with the National Park Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and Texas A&M University at Galveston. During the annual American Geophysical Union Fall conference, they held a seminar on ocean noise. In order to get a clearer global understanding of the pandemic's impact on ocean soundscapes, they intend to consult with scientists from other regions of the planet.
The researchers are still going to be closely monitoring humpback whales. To see if there are any variations in their stress hormones this year and next year, they will take biopsy samples from the whales. And they are listening in on how the contact of the whales will improve. They're wondering if the vocalisations of whales get more nuanced as they can better understand each other and vice versa. Studies in the past have shown that as ambient noise rises, whales raise their voices, much as humans would in a loud environment, which typically does not allow for drawn-out exchanges.
In order to explore their worlds, locate food, and stop being food for anything else, there are several other ways that complex sea life relies on sound. To truly grasp all that, physicists are scrambling to make the best of this peaceful reprieve. The hope is that some of this analysis will persuade policies and technical developments that in the future will be able to hold the clamour of the ocean down to bearable levels, even as economic growth recovers.
