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A recent study suggests that killer whales and other marine mammals are far more likely to pick up sonar signals than was previously thought.

Scientists have discovered that commercially available sonar systems, which are designed to create signals beyond the range of hearing of such animals, do in fact emit signals known to be within their hearing range.

The sound is likely very soft and audible only when the animals are within a few hundred meters of the source, say the authors of a new study. The signals would not cause any actual tissue damage, but it’s possible that they affect the behavior of some marine mammals, which rely heavily on sound to communicate, navigate, and find food.
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In order to know that, we need to know how many whales were in the oceans 200 years ago, BEFORE the industrial whaling era. One way to do this is to measure whale songs, but how can we listen to sounds that no longer exist?

Two researchers have managed to do that by using whaling records to estimate how loud whale sounds were 50 years ago, compared to today, by analyzing whaling records, assigning sound levels to the number of whales killed, and comparing those sound records to the CURRENT ocean racket. They have come to the conclusion that the ocean is much louder today, now that most whaling has become illegal.
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We know that animals talk to EACH OTHER, but lately, they’ve started talking to US (and they’re speaking our language as well!)

Elephants can communicate with each other, using sounds too high-pitched for us to hear, and if they want to "talk" to us, they can communicate telepathically. Now an Asian elephant named Koshik communicate to people more directly, by imitating human speech by vocalizing with his trunk.

But before we rush over there, we should know that he only speaks Korean, and that his vocabulary consists of five words.
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When oceanographer listened to the audio picked up by a recording device that spent a year in the icy waters off the east coast of Greenland, she was stunned at what she heard: whales singing a remarkable variety of songs nearly constantly for five wintertime months.

Only around 40 sightings of these whales, which were hunted almost to extinction, have been reported there since the 1970s. The fact that they’re singing again shows that, despite many horrible incidents, they’re happy again.
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