Abstract
The Gulf of Mexico is a region densely populated by marine mammals that must adapt to living in a highly active industrial environment. This paper presents a new approach to quantifying the anthropogenic impact on the marine mammal population. The results for sperm and beaked whales of a case study of regional population dynamics trends after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, derived from passive acoustic-monitoring data gathered before and after the spill in the vicinity of the accident, are presented.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the members of the Littoral Acoustic Demonstration Center (LADC) who are not coauthoring this article for data collection in 2007 and 2010 and Sean Griffin of Proteus Technologies for technical assistance in deployment and recovery of the environmental acoustic recording system (EARS) buoys in 2010. We also express our gratitude to Greenpeace for donating ship time and crew service for the 2010 experiment. Prespill data collection and research are supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR). The 2010 data collection and research were partially supported by US National Science Foundation Grant No. DMS-1059753.
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Sidorovskaia, N.A., Ackleh, A.S., Tiemann, C.O., Ma, B., Ioup, J.W., Ioup, G.E. (2016). Passive Acoustic Monitoring of the Environmental Impact of Oil Exploration on Marine Mammals in the Gulf of Mexico. In: Popper, A., Hawkins, A. (eds) The Effects of Noise on Aquatic Life II. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 875. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2981-8_125
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2981-8_125
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