“The anticipation is that the quieter environment will help the killer whales in communicating, in socializing, in navigating and most importantly, in finding food,” said Richard Dewey, the organization’s associate director of science.A paper published last month in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America said there has been about a 30 per cent decrease in commercial shipping traffic into the Port of Vancouver from China due to COVID-19 in just the first four months of the year.
One of the major concerns for the endangered southern resident killer whales is that shipping noises have been increasing and almost doubling every decade, he said. “They echo-locate to find their salmon. It’s a very sophisticated sort of acoustic capability and the quieter the environment, they would have more success in finding prey.”In the ocean, Dewey said whales use sound “continuously and all the time.”
He compared it to someone going into a loud club and having to pause until noise passes, to speak more loudly or give up. He noted that unlike people in a club, orcas can’t just leave for a quieter space. The director of the University of British Columbia’s marine mammal research unit said that in the past, killer whales would be seen in the Salish Sea in May and June, but for the past four years they have been coming in much later, sometimes as late as September.
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