Related Research Articles
The blue whale is a marine mammal and a baleen whale. Reaching a maximum confirmed length of 29.9 meters (98 ft) and weighing up to 199 tonnes, it is the largest animal known ever to have existed. The blue whale's long and slender body can be of various shades of greyish-blue dorsally and somewhat lighter underneath. Four subspecies are recognized: B. m. musculus in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, B. m. intermedia in the Southern Ocean, B. m. brevicauda in the Indian Ocean and South Pacific Ocean, B. m. indica in the Northern Indian Ocean. There is also a population in the waters off Chile that may constitute a fifth subspecies.
Marine mammals are aquatic mammals that rely on the ocean and other marine ecosystems for their existence. They include animals such as seals, whales, manatees, sea otters and polar bears. They are an informal group, unified only by their reliance on marine environments for feeding and survival.
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, nonprofit research and higher education facility dedicated to the study of marine science and engineering.
The minke whale, or lesser rorqual, is a species complex of baleen whale. The two species of minke whale are the common minke whale and the Antarctic minke whale. The minke whale was first described by the Danish naturalist Otto Fabricius in 1780, who assumed it must be an already known species and assigned his specimen to Balaena rostrata, a name given to the northern bottlenose whale by Otto Friedrich Müller in 1776. In 1804, Bernard Germain de Lacépède described a juvenile specimen of Balaenoptera acuto-rostrata. The name is a partial translation of Norwegian minkehval, possibly after a Norwegian whaler named Meincke, who mistook a northern minke whale for a blue whale.
The Pacific white-sided dolphin, also known as the hookfin porpoise, is an active dolphin found in the cool or temperate waters of the North Pacific Ocean.
Whales use a variety of sounds for communication and sensation. The mechanisms used to produce sound vary from one family of cetaceans to another. Marine mammals, including whales, dolphins, and porpoises, are much more dependent on sound than land mammals due to the limited effectiveness of other senses in water. Sight is less effective for marine mammals because of the particulate way in which the ocean scatters light. Smell is also limited, as molecules diffuse more slowly in water than in air, which makes smelling less effective. However, the speed of sound is roughly four times greater in water than in the atmosphere at sea level. As sea mammals are so dependent on hearing to communicate and feed, environmentalists and cetologists are concerned that they are being harmed by the increased ambient noise in the world's oceans caused by ships, sonar and marine seismic surveys.
Ocean acoustic tomography is a technique used to measure temperatures and currents over large regions of the ocean. On ocean basin scales, this technique is also known as acoustic thermometry. The technique relies on precisely measuring the time it takes sound signals to travel between two instruments, one an acoustic source and one a receiver, separated by ranges of 100–5,000 kilometres (54–2,700 nmi). If the locations of the instruments are known precisely, the measurement of time-of-flight can be used to infer the speed of sound, averaged over the acoustic path. Changes in the speed of sound are primarily caused by changes in the temperature of the ocean, hence the measurement of the travel times is equivalent to a measurement of temperature. A 1 °C (1.8 °F) change in temperature corresponds to about 4 metres per second (13 ft/s) change in sound speed. An oceanographic experiment employing tomography typically uses several source-receiver pairs in a moored array that measures an area of ocean.
Herald Shoal is a region of high benthic productivity on the Chukchi Sea shelf. It serves as rich foraging habitat for many species of marine mammals and birds.
Karen Frances Wishner is an American oceanographer currently at University of Rhode Island and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her interests include coastal shelf and zooplankton behavior and environment, and has published her findings.
Kathleen (Kathy) Crane is an American marine geologist, best known for her contributions to the discovery of hydrothermal vents on the Galápagos Rift along the East Pacific Rise in the mid-1970s.
Christine Erbe is a German-Australian physicist specializing in underwater acoustics. She is a professor in the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences and director of the Centre for Marine Science and Technology (CMST)—both at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, Australia. Erbe is known for her research on acoustic masking in marine mammals, investigating how man-made underwater noise interferes with animal acoustic communication.
Jennifer Miksis-Olds is an American marine scientist known for her research using acoustics to track marine mammals.
Susan Parks is an ecologist at Syracuse University known for her research on acoustic signaling and the impact of ambient noise on communication in marine mammals.
Jacqueline M. Grebmeier is an American ecologist who specializes in polar biological oceanography.
Zanna Chase is an ocean-going professor of chemical oceanography and paleoceanography at the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Science, University of Tasmania, Australia. She has undertaken over 20 voyages on research vessels, and her areas of expertise are Antartic paleoclimate, marine carbon cycle, radionuclides in the ocean, sediment geochemistry, paleoceanography, and marine biogeochemistry. In 2013 she was awarded with an ARC Future Fellowship.
Mary-Louise Elizabeth Timmermans is a marine scientist known for her work on the Arctic Ocean. She is the Damon Wells Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Yale University.
Sue E. Moore is a scientist at the University of Washington known for her research on marine mammals in the Arctic.
Ailsa Jane Hall is a British researcher who is Director of the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St Andrews. Her research considers the impact of contaminants on the risk of mortality in marine mammals.
Lisa Taylor Ballance is an American marine scientist who is Director Marine Mammal Institute and Endowed Chair for Marine Mammal Research at Oregon State University.
References
- ↑ "Kate Stafford". Sitka Whalefest. Retrieved 2022-03-08.
- ↑ "Kathleen Stafford". Marine Mammal Institute. Retrieved 2022-03-08.
- ↑ "The changing acoustic environment of the Arctic". Interalia Magazine. 2021-01-17. Retrieved 2022-03-08.
- ↑ Stafford, Kathleen Mary (1995). Characterization of blue whale calls from the northeast Pacific and development of a matched filter to locate blue whales on the U.S. Navy SOSUS (SOund SUrveillance System) arrays (Thesis). OCLC 36946530.
- ↑ Stafford, Kathleen Mary (2001). Blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) vocalizations recorded in the North Pacific Ocean: geographic, seasonal and diel variation (Thesis). OCLC 48207734.
- ↑ "Kate Stafford — Australian Marine Mammal Centre". www.marinemammals.gov.au. Retrieved 2022-03-08.
| International | |
|---|---|
| Academics | |
| Other | |
