From seismic surveys and Navy sonar to fisheries and shipping, many human activities in the ocean environment cause short-term changes in the behaviors of marine mammals.
A longstanding challenge for scientists and regulatory agencies alike has been to understand the biological significance of those changes in terms of their overall impact on affected populations of animals.
A new study led by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, provides a comprehensive framework for conducting this type of assessment. Published August 25 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the paper synthesizes a huge amount of knowledge about marine mammals and research on the impacts of various disturbances.
Senior author Daniel Costa, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, said he first began grappling with this problem decades ago when he was studying the impact of low-frequency sound on whales and other marine mammals.
“We had measurable parameters that were statistically significant, but we didn’t know the biological significance of these changes in behavior. That bothered me, and it bothered a lot of other people in the field,” he said. [Read more…] about When humans disturb marine mammals, it’s hard to know the long-term impact
Related Posts
- 38
After centuries of human impact on the world's ecosystems, a new study from Flinders University details an example of how a common native bee species has flourished since the very first land clearances by humans on Fiji. In a new paper in Molecular Ecology (DOI: 10.1111/mec.16034), research led by Flinders University explores… - 32
The death of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was caused by the impact of a huge asteroid on the Earth. However, palaeontologists have continued to debate whether they were already in decline or not before the impact. In a new study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, an international… - 32
Scientists at The Marine Mammal Center – the world's largest marine mammal hospital – have found that viral-caused cancer in adult California sea lions is significantly increased by their exposure to toxins in the environment. The study is the result of over 20 years of research and examination of nearly… - 30
The increased temperature and acidification of our oceans over the next century have been argued to cause significant physical changes in an economically important marine species. Scientists from the University of Plymouth exposed blue mussels (Mytilus edulis) to current and future levels of ocean acidification (OA) or warming (W), as…
