I just read an article about how boat noise is affecting the cellular development of sea hares, specifically sea slugs. These creatures aren't just the ordinary slug... They are crucial to the environment in that they eat toxic alga that can end up harming fish that we so dearly love! Boat noise was played next to half a batch of sea slug eggs and the other half enjoyed calming reef sounds. The side with the boat noise had a success rate that was more than 20% less than the reef side. The boat sounds not only harm the development inside the egg but make the sea slug less likely to survive! A possible solution is to control boat usage in critical areas. Simply don't allow boats in during the spawning and developing period. This could be a problem because the sea slugs might spawn in a very desirable area for boating. I personally believe that this is just a problem we are going to have to face.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140731095013.htm
Hey Jack, that's quite an interesting article. I have never heard of noise affecting any sort of sea creature. I think your suggestion is a great idea! Although I'm not too familiar with sea slugs, maybe its possible to raise them in a separate facility where noise is not an issue and then release them back into their habitat to eat the algae. It will be interesting to see what is done!
ReplyDeleteThat is very interesting because I have never even heard of a sea slug and I never knew of this issue. I believe that no one has really considered that boat noises had such effects on these animals, or any animals at all. I didn’t think that boat noises caused any harm to anyone until now. You have a good idea but I’m not sure if that would necessarily work. It would be too difficult to keep the boats out and figure out when this spawning period is for all sea slugs. My suggestion would be to maybe create a new boat noise that doesn’t affect the slugs although that idea might be too difficult as well.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really interesting article, because I never would have thought that noise could hurt the slugs so much. I agree with you that we could resolve this issue by limiting boat usage in areas where the sea slugs live in order to do as little damage to their populations as possible. Did the article say if there was a certain amount of noise the slugs could handle until it started to harm them? If that was the case, we could try to find ways to prevent the amount of noise boats give off so that we can use still boats without harming the slugs.
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