Cetaceans and humans: influences of noise

摘要: Whales, dolphins and porpoises face a multitude of problems at the hands of humans. These include incidental kills in fishing nets and lines, direct kills for food or bait, debilitation (and death) due to pollution or other forms of habitat degradation (see Chapters 12-15 in this volume), and the mainly unknown potential effects of larger-scale ecological changes such as human-induced global climate change (Brownell et al., 1989; Tynan and DeMaster, 1997). But besides these problems, there is another often difficult to measure cause of decline in health of habitat for marine mammals. This is human-induced noise, and its potential effects were not investigated until relatively recently, in the past thirty years or so. A rather thorough discussion of noise impacts on marine mammals is provided by Richardson et al. (1995); we here summarise the situation for cetaceans, and provide several examples and possible …