Wesley R. Elsberry
Posts: 4991
Joined: May 2002
|
The Smithsonian gets it wrong about NOC the whale.
| Quote |
Four years after Noc launched into his talking spree, he just as abruptly stopped, reverting in 1999 to “Beluga” for the rest of his days in captivity. In the early 1990s, with the end of the cold war and cutbacks in defense spending, the Marine Mammal Program was greatly downsized. By then only three belugas remained in the Point Loma enclosure, Muk Tuk, Noc and Ruby. Lyl had succumbed to pneumonia only two years into his training. Chr died of a lung infection in 1984. Churchill died in 1987 of pneumonia. In April 1997, Ruby was transferred to SeaWorld, though she remains the property of the U.S. Navy.
Muk Tuk and Noc, however, were retained for a new operation, dubbed Deep Hear. It was developed to test the potential effects on marine mammals of a new type of low-frequency active sonar (LFAS), which has since been cited by more than 100 scientists as the cause of massive whale strandings. The noise often induces entire pods to surface so rapidly in an attempt to escape it, they die of a condition to which scientists had assumed whales to be immune: the bends. In 2001, Muk Tuk joined Ruby behind the glass at Wild Arctic. She died of a lung infection in 2007.
|
My response to a comment that picked up the article author's confused chronology and misinformation about Deep Hear and ran with it follows:
| Quote |
There's no mystery about why NOC "stopped talking" in 1999: he died that year. I don't know why the author tried to create mystery around this; the basic information is even seen in Wikipedia.
And I'm not sure why the reporter goes on about low-frequency sonar and whales, when the recognized problem is actually with mid-frequency sonars. The historical record on adverse effects of mid-frequency sonar on beaked whales is clear.
http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr....ans.pdf
I'm also not sure why the reporter got so much wrong about the Deep Hear study. Here's a link to the freely available text of the paper reporting its methods and results:
http://jeb.biologists.org/content....29.long
If you look in the methods, you will find that the sounds presented to the whales were a trainer's projected "bridge" stimulus and 0.5 second pure tones produced by a function generator (look for "Wavetek 275" in the report). There wasn't any use of a naval sonar system in the experiment, low-frequency or otherwise. How much effort would it have taken to look at the actual source materials and accurately relay them to readers? The methods of Deep Hear in studying hearing are all standard psychophysics techniques that you yourself might experience in your next trip to your audiologist, except that you won't be asked to dive to do them.
The field season dates are not included in the paper, but Deep Hear data collection was conducted in 1994 and 1995. I participated in the 1995 field season and the analytical workup that followed. The confusion engendered by the article over chronology is certainly regrettable. The Deep Hear study had non-mysterious results, too: the hearing of whales remains just as sensitive at depth, and thus policy on noise mitigation cannot rely on the notion that mammalian hearing sensitivity decreases with depth. That was known to be true for humans and chinchillas, but Deep Hear demonstrated that it was not true for white whales, and thus unlikely to be true for the rest of the cetacea. This is in many ways an inconvenient result for both commercial and military interests, and yet there was no interference in our ability to publish these findings.
|
--------------
"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
|
