3 ms·

Couldn't this directly be tested directly very easily by playing high intensity infrasound and see if they react.

• duped 3y ago
  Irrespective of the ethics of this (if you redirect migration you can kill the population) there's a practical problem which is that high intensity infrasound is quite difficult and expensive to create. Normally this research works by observing second order effects of known sources of infrasound. For example if we track migration of whales/dolphins in the ocean by tagging them and observe the introduction of some noise pollution (like a new oil well in the Gulf) change those patterns, we can infer that the sound was the source of the change. A really amazing example of this that someone linked was the pigeon race between Paris and London that was diverted, and the timing of it was directly linked to the Concord going supersonic over the Atlantic on a flight from London to New York (the interesting bit is that the flight was delayed and the timing of the flight lined up perfectly with when the birds were over the English Channel). The whole field of acoustic/audio conservation is a young one and there's some very interesting research all the time. Off the top of my head, I know NOAA was researching this in the Gulf and South Florida about a decade ago with the University of Miami but I don't know if there were notable publications.