![]() The area has heavy boat traffic from both shipping and recreational vessels, similar to most coastal areas near busy ports. “If you’re living by a noisy road, that can be quite stressful,” she says, “and so we’re concerned.”īailey and her colleagues collected sound from an area about 20 miles off the coast of Ocean City, Maryland, to gather baseline data on a proposed wind farm site. Bailey says that constant, high levels of background noise may not only hamper their ability to communicate, but also lead to chronic stress. ![]() Marine mammals communicate mainly through sound, and use whistles to greet each other, share information about food, and talk to their calves. ![]() “They’re probably also sharing less information, because they’re just trying to be heard over the noise." "They’re really having to simplify what they say," says Helen Bailey, a marine biologist with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, and an author on a paper last week in Biology Letters that explains the phenomenon. ![]() ![]() (Wilfredo Lee/AP) This article is more than 4 years old.Īs speedboats and cargo ships continue to make the world’s oceans noisier, bottlenose dolphins are adapting their calls - making their whistles simpler, shorter and higher frequency - to compensate. In this 2011 photo, Kibby, an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, is shown at the Dolphin Research Center in Grassy Key, Fla. ![]()
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