Talking To Animals

Reported February 2011

SANTA CRUZ, CA (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- 71 percent of the earths' surface is covered by the sea. Water provides 99-pecent of the earth's living space. Did you know that the animals and fish living in it are in jeopardy? Now, a couple of dolphins, some sea otters and a monk seal are helping researchers save our seas and the billion of lives in it.

What’s going on at the Marine Lab, could impact what’s happening in our oceans.

“We’re doing things that people have never done with monk seals,” Beau Richter, a head trainer at the Long Marine Lab in Santa Cruz, told Ivanhoe.

He spends every day with a critically endangered Hawaiian monk seal, named Poeyeownah.

“He definitely lives up to his age of being two years old, he’s very curious, he’s always trying to impress people,” Richter said.

Not only do these guys have to watch out for sharks, but fishing nets and pollution are the main reasons there are only 11-hundred Hawaiian monk seals left on earth, and ecologists want to learn more.

“One of the things we’ve learned about monk seals is their attraction to just about anything, garbage, fishing nets, anything that in the water, they’re really curious about," Terrie Williams, Ph.D., a professor of ecology at UC Santa Cruz, explained.

Poeyeownah suffers from cataracts in both eyes, and is being treated at the Long marine Lab. Hope is that he’ll return to the waters off of Hawaii this year. An ex-navy, Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, Pooka, is under this screen. Biologists are testing the acoustics of different sounds to see how boats or noise pollution affects them.

“They are changing their vocal patterns. They’re producing louder sounds as vessel traffic noise increases,” Dawn Norr, a Research Fishery Biologist, added.

The two dolphins wear a heart vest to monitor how noises from oil rigs, or other man-made things affect them.

“If it happens to them under water, potentially they could get the bends, so the key is to understand what noise does to their heart rate, which is absolutely unheard of for a marine mammal," Dr. Williams said.

For the first time ever, researchers are able to check out the heart rate of a sea otter named Taylor.

“We’re trying to figure out sort of the Achilles heal that a dolphin might have, or a seal or a sea otter might have…if we can figure that out, then we can create habitats for these animals to live," Dr. Williams said.

Dr. Williams worries that we’ve given up on the fight and wants to renew our passion to save our seas and the billions of lives that depend on it.

“You have want it more than oil, you have to want it more than fish on the table, and you just have to want it more. But if you do, you can have it. I know it’s out there,” Dr. Williams said.

It’s just not dolphins and monk seals who are threatened but the populations of many species are decreasing at an unsustainable rate, including whales, manatees, salmon, seabirds, sea turtles and sharks. All could be extinct in the next 50 years.

The American Geophysical Union and the Acoustical Society of America contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Terrie M. Williams, PhD
Professor of Ecology
UC Santa Cruz
williams@biology.ucsc.edu

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