Newswise — A final wave of electronic ears are being put in place in the Gulf of Mexico, listening in on whales that cruise the waters to learn where they are, how many there are and how they are faring since massive amounts of oil were released into their environment.
In partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is now placing the final seven of 22 “marine autonomous recording units” in the Gulf. The goal is to document the state of the sounds in the ecosystem over an extended period of time.
“Night after night, on TV and on webcams, we saw oil spewing from the bottom of the ocean,” said Christopher Clark, head of the BRP team at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “You wonder, ‘What can we do? What's the impact of this?’ In the case of marine mammals, we don't know because we don't even know what's there.”
Clark and his team are collaborating with NOAA in an effort to discover the numbers and locations of whales and assess the potential impact of oil clouds drifting below the surface. The team is anchoring recording units 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 recording units will listen for sperm whales and a small population of Bryde’s whales. They also will pick up sounds of fish and ship traffic. Some devices are being placed in areas believed to be unaffected by the oil; others will be close to the well.
“This will be the first large-scale, long-term, acoustic monitoring survey in the Gulf of Mexico,” Clark said. “The whales are like oversized canaries in the coal mine – they reflect the health of the environment they live in.”
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