You might be annoyed by loud noises going off near your head (I’m looking at you Mr Fire-alarm Tester). It may be that whales aren’t so fussed.
‘Study: seismic has little effect on Gulf whales’, says AP. ‘Shipping, noise don’t seem to bother endangered giants, researchers say’, exclaims the Houston Chronicle.
Researchers working the Gulf of Mexico have found that Sperm Whales don’t seem to be too disturbed by oil and gas prospects doing surveys with noisy air guns. This is handy given the recent political moves towards offshore drilling.
According to Doug Biggs of Texas A&M university:
The bottom line is that airgun noise from seismic surveys that are thousands of yards distant does not drive away sperm whales living in the Gulf. However, some individual whales feeding at depth reduced the rate at which they searched acoustically for their prey when scientists carried out controlled exposure experiments by bringing seismic surveys close by the whales. (Press release.)
Because of this industry air-blasters will shut down when they come within 500m of whales. It’s not immediately clear how they’re planning to locate said whales.
Biggs’s team tagged 98 whales to relay data on sound levels and behaviour in the study. However another press release from fellow researchers at Oregon State University says “Scientists didn’t have enough samples of whales migrating closer than five kilometres during air gun deployment to draw any conclusions about close-range impacts.”
If that’s the case it seems strange to shut down when the whales coming within 500m. Surely the thing to do would be shut down when the came with five km or not at all?
Also, the study found some whales live in the Gulf for most of the year. If air guns reduce the amount of time they spend feeding there could be knock on impacts on their health (an issue explored recently in this Nature story).
In other news the US Department of Interior put out this statement today:
Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced that the Western Gulf of Mexico Oil and Gas Lease Sale 207, held today in New Orleans, attracted $487,297,676 in high bids. The sale was conducted by Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) and had 53 companies submitting 423 bids on 319 tracts comprising over 1.8 million acres offshore Texas. The sum of all bids received totaled $607,134,968.