Updates, Literature, News, Websites & Educator Resources

Updates

In December, 2020, 4 months after the release of Sentinels of Silence? Whale Watching, Boat Noise, and the Orca, Washington State’s Fish and WIldlife’s Commercial Whale-Watching Licensing Program voted to license and restrict whale watching, increasing oversight and daily monitoring of commercial whale watching activities. The new rules and regulations: https://wdfw.wa.gov/species-habitats/at-risk/species-recovery/orca/rule-making

Here are past updates, providing a backwards timeline indicating how we have reached this historic moment…

Washington Fish and WIldlife’s Commercial Whale-Watching Licensing Program has published their proposed rules. Public participation has been invited and will be accepted until Nov. 13. We encourage everyone that cares about Southern Resident Killer Whales, the Salish Sea community, and conservation, to get involved.

The Commercial Whale Watching Licensing Advisory Committee is helping to develop regulations and procedures to comply with new policies enacted by the Washington State Legislature. The CWWLAC Science Panel is advising the committee on the best available, peer-reviewed science regarding noise impacts. The Science Panel’s review of the available literature regarding the “sentinel effect” dealt with in the film, led to this assessment in their Review of Proposed Rules and they were drawing on an August 2020 report by the Washington Academy of Sciences reviewing the best available peer-reviewed publications and data.

“The WSAS committee notes that there is insufficient scientific evidence to support a sentinel effect (in which the presence of CWW vessels and active outreach by operators serves to alert and slow other vessels) or magnet effect (in which the presence of CWW vessels draws in additional vessels) of CWW vessels. In particular, many of the justifications in Proposal J about the effect of CWW in reducing overall vessel impacts are unsupported by current evidence.”

A coalition of whale protection groups is asking whale watching companies and recreational boaters to take a pledge to refrain from following and watching the Southern Resident Killer Whales and limit their distance to 1000 yards in coming years. Friends of the San Juans, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Seattle Aquarium, The Whale Trail, and Washington Environmental Council ask you to sign these pledges: (1) whale watching companies, (2) recreational boaters, and (3) individuals.

Give Them Space.org provides a useful FAQ about noise and orcas, and includes Action Alerts.

Research

The Commercial Whale Watching Licensing Advisory Committee’s Science Panel has issued a review of “the best available science” in regard to noise and the orca, drawing on a August 2020 report by the Washington Academy of Sciences. Meanwhile, here is a bibliographic listing of relevant literature, first for the orca, then more generally for marine contexts, and finally the bioacoustic literature.

One of the most complete and updated (2020) sets of bibliographic references specifically dealing with noise and the Southern Resident Killer Whales can be found in undergraduate honours thesis written by Alyssa Andress at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario). That bibliography, and Andress’s entire thesis, can be accessed here: https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/bitstream/handle/1974/27793/ensc_501_Andress.pdf?sequence=1

In addition to the work cited in the film, additional relevant research from the field of bioacoustics, sound studies, and noise pollution policy research…

Bain, David E., A. W. Trites, and R. Williams. "A model linking energetic effects of whale watching to killer whale (Orcinus orca) population dynamics." Friday Harbor Laboratories, University of Washington, Friday Harbor, Washington (2002).

De Clerck, Sara, Filipa IP Samarra, Jörundur Svavarsson, Xavier Mouy, and Paul Wensveen. "Noise influences the acoustic behavior of killer whales, Orcinus orca, in Iceland." In Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 5ENAL, vol. 37, no. 1, p. 040003. Acoustical Society of America, 2019.

Erbe, Christine, Rebecca Dunlop, and Sarah Dolman. "Effects of noise on marine mammals." In Effects of anthropogenic noise on animals, pp. 277-309. Springer, New York, NY, 2018.

Foote, Andrew D., Richard W. Osborne, and A. Rus Hoelzel. "Whale-call response to masking boat noise." Nature 428, no. 6986 (2004): 910-910.

Forney, Karin A., Brandon L. Southall, Elisabeth Slooten, Steve Dawson, Andrew J. Read, Robin W. Baird, and Robert L. Brownell Jr. "Nowhere to go: noise impact assessments for marine mammal populations with high site fidelity." Endangered species research 32 (2017): 391-413.

Gillespie, A., 2007. The precautionary principle in the twenty-first century: a case study of noise pollution in the ocean. The international journal of marine and coastal law, 22(1), pp.61-87.

Herbert, Steve. "Fear and loathing in the San Juan Islands: endangered orcas and the legitimacy of environmental law." Environment and Planning A 46, no. 8 (2014): 1781-1796.

Holt, Marla M., Dawn P. Noren, Val Veirs, Candice K. Emmons, and Scott Veirs. "Speaking up: Killer whales (Orcinus orca) increase their call amplitude in response to vessel noise." The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 125, no. 1 (2009): EL27-EL32.

Holt, Marla M., Dawn P. Noren, and Candice K. Emmons. "Does vessel noise affect the use of sound by foraging Orcinus orca (killer whales)?." In The Effects of Noise on Aquatic Life, pp. 327-330. Springer, New York, NY, 2012.

Houghton, Juliana, Marla M. Holt, Deborah A. Giles, M. Bradley Hanson, Candice K. Emmons, Jeffrey T. Hogan, Trevor A. Branch, and Glenn R. VanBlaricom. "The relationship between vessel traffic and noise levels received by killer whales (Orcinus orca)." PloS one 10, no. 12 (2015): e0140119.

Houser, Dorian S., William Yost, Robert Burkard, James J. Finneran, Colleen Reichmuth, and Jason Mulsow. "A review of the history, development and application of auditory weighting functions in humans and marine mammals." The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 141, no. 3 (2017): 1371-1413.

Jelinski, D. E., C. C. Krueger, and D. A. Duffus. "Geostatistical analyses of interactions between killer whales (Orcinus orca) and recreational whale-watching boats." Applied Geography 22, no. 4 (2002): 393-411.

Lacy, Robert C., Rob Williams, Erin Ashe, Kenneth C. Balcomb III, Lauren JN Brent, Christopher W. Clark, Darren P. Croft, Deborah A. Giles, Misty MacDuffee, and Paul C. Paquet. "Evaluating anthropogenic threats to endangered killer whales to inform effective recovery plans." Scientific reports 7, no. 1 (2017): 1-12.

Lusseau, David, David E. Bain, Rob Williams, and Jodi C. Smith. "Vessel traffic disrupts the foraging behavior of southern resident killer whales Orcinus orca." Endangered Species Research 6, no. 3 (2009): 211-221.

Morton, Alexandra B., and Helena K. Symonds. "Displacement of Orcinus orca (L.) by high amplitude sound in British Columbia, Canada." ICES Journal of Marine Science 59, no. 1 (2002): 71-80.

Popper, Arthur N., and Anthony D. Hawkins. "An overview of fish bioacoustics and the impacts of anthropogenic sounds on fishes." Journal of Fish Biology 94, no. 5 (2019): 692-713.

Wieland, Monika, Albyn Jones, and SusanC P. Renn. "Changing durations of southern resident killer whale (Orcinus orca) discrete calls between two periods spanning 28 years." Marine mammal science 26, no. 1 (2010): 195.

For those interested in bioacoustics more broadly, here are several comprehensive and peer-reviewed reviews of the literature in various other subfields. Shannon et al. (2016) remains one of the most comprehensive summaries and assessments of the literature concerning the effects of anthropogenic noise on other animals:

Greenhalgh, Jack A., Martin J. Genner, Gareth Jones, and Camille Desjonquères. "The role of freshwater bioacoustics in ecological research." Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water 7, no. 3 (2020): e1416.

Raboin, Maggie, and Damian O. Elias. "Anthropogenic noise and the bioacoustics of terrestrial invertebrates." Journal of Experimental Biology 222, no. 12 (2019).

Seely, Elizabeth, Richard W. Osborne, Kari Koski, and Shawn Larson. "Soundwatch: eighteen years of monitoring whale watch vessel activities in the Salish Sea." PloS one 12, no. 12 (2017): e0189764.

Shannon, Graeme, Megan F. McKenna, Lisa M. Angeloni, Kevin R. Crooks, Kurt M. Fristrup, Emma Brown, Katy A. Warner et al. "A synthesis of two decades of research documenting the effects of noise on wildlife." Biological Reviews 91, no. 4 (2016): 982-1005.

Valenzuela, Peter. "Examination of killer whale (Orcinus orca) call duration changes to boat noise and vessel presence." (2009).

Williams, Rob, David E. Bain, Jodi C. Smith, and David Lusseau. "Effects of vessels on behaviour patterns of individual southern resident killer whales Orcinus orca." Endangered Species Research 6, no. 3 (2009): 199-209.

News and Informational Programming

New York Times: “Oceans are Getting Louder”
Seattle Times: “New Rules Would Greatly Reduce Whale Watching” and “The Roar Below”

Public Lands Podcast: Southern Resident Protection

Commentary in Crosscut: “To help save orcas, pause whale watching”

Websites

Georgia Strait Alliance: Orcas are Drowning in Noise

Discovery of Sound in the Sea: Killer Whale, Orca

Marine Mammal Commission

The Whale Trail

Give Them Space.org provides a useful FAQ about noise and orcas, and includes Action Alerts

Southern Resident Orca Task Force

Souther Resident Orca Task Force Final Report & Recommendations

NOAA Southern Resident Killer Whales website

Email contacts for informants that appeared in the film, in alphabetical order: Donna Sandstrom <donna@thewhaletrail.org>, Tim Ragen <tjragen@gmail.com>

Educator Resources

In addition to the introduction to bioacoustics and conservation policy in the film, this documentary short presents a fascinating case study in environmental policy making informed by science, debate, and conservation values. For example, the film is useful for teaching the “precautionary principle,” leading to productive discussion regarding the roles of science, conservationists, industry, nonprofits, and various publics in forming conservation policies. In addition to the film and this supplemental resource site, these questions are useful for classroom discussion, and the simple field exercise that follows might serve as a productive experiential learning assignment.

Were you aware that most major environmental policy issues, such as the whale watch licensing program, involve a process of public participation?

Do you think it is important for environmental policymakers and regulators to have a public participation process?

What roles to citizens play in environmental decision-making?

What roles do various institutions, such as nonprofits and business groups, play in the policy making process?

Which voices have been taken into account in the past and which do you think will prevail in current and future legislation concerning the Southern Resident Killer Whales?

Are there opportunities here for inter-sector dialogue and decision making, or do you think that one group or institution will have an inordinate ability to affect policy?

Learn about public participation by experiencing it for yourself. Visit a local, county, state, or federal government website to find out about a policy making body that is currently inviting public input on an environmental matter. Study the proposal and issue from various perspectives, drawing on the best available expert testimony. If possible, read some of the peer-reviewed literature cited by experts. Form your position on the proposed new law, regulation, permit, or policy proposal under discussion. Using the public participation method offered by the decision making body (e.g., a web portal for written input), offer your perspective. After you have done so, write a 300-500 word report describing the process of public participation that you experienced, from start to finish. You do not need to share the specific input you gave in regard to the policy in question; that is between you, as a citizen, and your government. Now, having experienced public participation in environmental decision making for yourself, and having described that process, what are some of the benefits of doing so? How might the public participation process you experienced be improved?