Abstract
Ocean ambient noise is a crucial habitat feature for marine animals because it represents the lower threshold of their acoustically active space. Ambient noise is affected by noise from both natural sources, like wind and ice, and anthropogenic sources, such as shipping and seismic surveys. During the ice-covered season, ambient conditions in the Arctic are quieter than those in other regions because sea ice has a dampening effect. Arctic warming induced by climate change can raise noise levels by reducing sea ice coverage and increasing human activity, and these changes may negatively affect several species of marine mammals and other acoustically sensitive marine fauna. We document ambient noise off the west coast of Banks Island near Sachs Harbour, Northwest Territories, to provide baseline noise levels for the eastern Beaufort Sea. Noise levels were comparable to those found in other studies of the Canadian Arctic and Alaska and were typically much lower than levels reported farther south. Stronger wind increased noise, whereas greater ice concentration decreased it, dampening the effect of wind speed. Future work should expand monitoring to other locations in the Arctic, model the impact of increased human activities on ambient noise levels, and predict the impact of these changing levels on marine animals.
Highlights
Ocean ambient noise is a crucial habitat feature for marine animals (Richardson et al, 1995; Au and Hastings, 2008; Tyack, 2008; Hildebrand, 2009; Merchant et al, 2015), especially for marine mammals that rely on sound for communication (Au and Hastings, 2008; Tyack, 2008; Hildebrand, 2009; Clark et al, 2015) and echolocation (Erbe, 2002; Soto et al, 2006; Tyack, 2008; Hildebrand, 2009), both of which evolved under specific ambient noise conditions (Tyack, 2008)
We present trends in ocean ambient noise determined over 15 months by using passive acoustic monitoring near Sachs Harbour, Northwest Territories, Canada, a small community on Banks Island in the eastern Beaufort Sea (Fig. 1)
Levels in January through March were skewed towards the lower edge of the Wenz curves, which suggests that levels in those months were limited by the noise floor of the recorders rather than by ambient noise levels
Summary
Ocean ambient noise is a crucial habitat feature for marine animals (Richardson et al, 1995; Au and Hastings, 2008; Tyack, 2008; Hildebrand, 2009; Merchant et al, 2015), especially for marine mammals that rely on sound for communication (Au and Hastings, 2008; Tyack, 2008; Hildebrand, 2009; Clark et al, 2015) and echolocation (Erbe, 2002; Soto et al, 2006; Tyack, 2008; Hildebrand, 2009), both of which evolved under specific ambient noise conditions (Tyack, 2008). Ambient noise is typically defined as noise from natural sources, but it can include anthropogenic noise that is a consistent aspect of background noise (e.g., aggregate shipping traffic; Richardson et al, 1995). While increased shipping has created a consistent increase in ocean ambient noise, anthropogenic sources (including shipping and other forms of transportation) create short-term increases in noise (Veirs et al, 2016). Noise affects general behaviour (Southall et al, 2007; Gomez et al, 2016), causing animals to avoid noise sources and altering their surface and respiration cycles (Richardson et al, 1995; Tyack, 2008), as well as increasing their stress levels (Rolland et al, 2012)
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