Web Content #1: The Unseen Threat of Noise in Our Oceans: Kristin Westdal

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo_GZ3q_Ays

This video put out by TEDxVancouver, discusses the importance of noise and sound to marine mammals. In this video, Kristin Westdal is a arctic marine biologist who had been studying the impact of human made sounds on these animals and how it affects their sense of surroundings.  She discussed how sound is a very critical sense for marine mammals since they use their sonar for finding food, finding their breathing holes, and finding other members of their pods.  When other human made sounds sounds from ships, icebreakers, and drilling put more sounds into the ocean, these sounds can really disorient marine mammals sense of direction.  She explained how these extra sounds have prevented many whales and their young from leaving parts of the ocean that consistently cover with ice, leaving dozens of whales to use the same breathing hole and mortality rate to increase for those areas.  It is very unusual that those mammals don't leave those areas, but the extra sounds that humans have put into the ocean have confused them and they couldn't pick out their sonar signals from the rest of the noise that was occurring around them.  She used this example to help us to better understand the situation: Imagine that you were driving down the road and an ambulance siren was going off but everyone around you was also honking their horns, it would be pretty difficult for you to locate the direction the sound of the ambulance was coming from with all of the other noises occurring around you. 

YouTube. Prod. TEDx Vancouver. Perf. Kristin Westdal. YouTube. YouTube, 06 Feb. 2013. Web. 19 Apr. 2013.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo_GZ3q_Ays.

This is a very interesting topic that i have never been aware of.  Kristen Westdal talked about how we can pollute the ocean with chemicals but polluting it with noise and sound could also be just as bad.  Marine mammals need to use their sense of sonar to locate things in their surroundings if they lose that sense they would be like us out in the middle of nowhere without a map or a GPS.  Just like we can't communicate when there is a bunch of background noise in our environment, these mammals can't tell which sound to follow when their sonar signal gets blocked by a bunch of other unnecessary noises that also occupy their surroundings.  I thought that it was really interesting that these animals use their sonar for so many different survival needs, like looking for food, finding their breathing holes in the ice, and finding each other.  If we take away their ability to perform these tasks we would basically be leaving them out there to die.