How Ship Noise Reduces Whale "Acoustic Habitat"

I first saw this animation by the folks at Cornell University's Bioacoustics program at the 2009 Society for Marine Mammals conference, and it blew my mind.  It's a visualization of how a whale's ability to be heard by other whales is effected by the noise of cargo ships moving through its space.  The calling whales in this video are represented by the little blue dots, while the noise of the cargo ships are the bigger, red dots.  The color of the dots symbolizes how noisy something is.  The whales are light blue because they are not very loud, and the ships are red because they are loud. The dots representing the ships also appear to be bigger, because their sound carries further.  You can see that when a ship passes by the little blue dot representing a calling whale, the whale's call is completely overshadowed by the ship noise.  The funny rectangle shape in this animation is the border of the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. The link below the video leads to more information from Scientific American.

Tweet