Image: George Karbus

“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that in 1953. Most people read it as a philosophical puzzle.

For most of the twentieth century, we treated it as one. The question we asked about dolphins was: do they have language? It is an honest question, asked with genuine wonder. But it’s built on a quiet assumption — that communication is something you can decode, and that wherever intelligence lives, there is a lexicon waiting to be found.

John C. Lilly, the neuroscientist and psychonaut who spent the 1960s trying to teach dolphins English in a flooded laboratory in the Virgin Islands — and who, as the decade wore on, began conducting his research increasingly under the influence of LSD — believed this completely. He was so convinced that dolphins were trying to talk to us in something translatable that he dedicated years, and ultimately his scientific reputation, to finding the codebook. What he found instead, perhaps without realizing it, was the limit of his own frame.

In Their World

Atlantic spotted dolphin and white-beaked dolphin vocalizations, rendered as wavelets by Mark Fischer— each sound a different shape.

The frame has since shifted. Not because we gave up on understanding dolphins, but because we started asking a different question — not “do they speak?” but “what does it mean to live inside sound the way we live inside light?”

The shift came not from a laboratory but from the water itself. Beginning in 1985, marine biologist Denise Herzing did something that seems obvious in retrospect but was genuinely radical at the time — she got in the ocean with a specific community of wild Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas and stayed there, summer after summer, for decades. No tanks, no controlled conditions, no attempt to bring the dolphins into our world. Just sustained, patient observation in theirs.

Each dolphin develops a unique vocalization early in life — a signature whistle that functions like a name. They use it to announce themselves, to maintain bonds across distance, to call to one another across water where vision falters. A mother and calf separated in the open ocean will find each other by sound alone. These identity calls can carry for miles. The ocean, it turns out, is full of introductions.

But a name is only the surface. The closer researchers listen, the more it becomes clear that what dolphins are doing with sound may be far richer — and far more alien — than a system of names and calls. To understand it, you have to start with the medium itself.

What Vibration Carries

Water is a different medium entirely — 3,500 times denser than air, and far more generous with the sound that moves through it. Sound travels nearly five times faster here, and farther, and with a persistence that air never allows. Dolphins navigate it through echolocation, emitting ultrasonic clicks that return detailed information about objects, distance, density, and movement. The returning echoes resolve not as sound but as shape — a three-dimensional acoustic “image” of the world around them. They “see” with sound. And if they can perceive form through vibration, the question that follows is one science is only beginning to take seriously: what else might vibration carry?

Researcher Jack Kassewitz and acoustics engineer John Stuart Reid have been exploring this through a device called the CymaScope — a tool that visualizes sound by the way vibration interacts with water surfaces. When dolphin phonations are projected into it, they generate complex, consistent geometric patterns. Different sounds produce different forms. You can get a rough intuition for this in your own kitchen: fill a wine glass halfway, run a wet finger around the rim, and watch the surface of the liquid organize itself into intricate, finely etched rings.

What Kassewitz suggests goes further. These patterns may not just be a byproduct of sound. One possibility is that they are part of how sound is perceived — that dolphins, communicating through a medium that physically organizes itself in response to vibration, may be generating and reading patterns in water the way we read expressions on a face. Not a sequence of symbols, but something more spatial, more continuous, more their own.

Thirty Million Years, Then Us

The acoustic world dolphins now inherit — one that has no precedent in thirty million years of evolution. Photo: NOAA

Dolphins don’t just live in a world shaped by sound — they perceive, navigate, and know each other through it. Their acoustic environment is the medium of their entire existence. Which means that when we fill that medium with noise, we are altering the substrate of their perception.

The industrialization of the ocean has been, among other things, an acoustic event. Shipping traffic, sonar, seismic surveying, offshore construction — these sounds travel farther underwater than almost anything we produce on land, accumulating in coastal environments into a constant presence that has no precedent in the evolutionary history of any marine animal. Every generation of dolphins is navigating a different acoustic world than the one that shaped them.

OCR was founded to understand what that costs — not as an emergency response, though it is one, but as a long-term, rigorous investigation measured in the currency of the lives that depend on it. Understanding what dolphins are doing with sound is inseparable from understanding what we are doing to it.

We are developing an immersive sixteen-channel spatial audio environment where visitors can step inside a living California soundscape — from the whistle-filled superpods of common dolphins racing offshore to the distinct dialects of orca pods moving through the Monterey Canyon, to the rookeries of the Farallones — because we believe that before people will protect what they cannot see, they need to hear it.

Wittgenstein was right that we might not understand a lion if it spoke. What he could not have anticipated is that we might one day learn how to listen — and that what we might hear could change how we understand the minds that have been speaking all along.

The post Dolphin Awareness Month | A Different Way of Knowing appeared first on Ocean Noise.

Belva Ann Lockwood, the first woman to be nominated for President in 1884 by the “Equal Rights Party.” If women had the right to vote in 1884, she may well have been our Nation’s first woman president.

But Women’s right to vote did not happen for another 36 years.

Where would we be now had she won the presidency?

The post Celebrating National Woman’s History Month appeared first on Ocean Noise.

Image: Craig Parry

Pages from the Ocean’s Story

Much of what we know about the ocean begins with a signal.

A whale’s call moving through dark water.
A life form thriving where sunlight never reaches.
A legal protection that holds — because people chose to defend it.

The ocean has been writing its story for billions of years.

What persists from one generation to the next depends on what signals get through. This month we explore three of those intersections.

Signals in the Water

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Ship navigation bridge — where whale detection may one day appear alongside vessel traffic.

Much of what we know about whales begins with listening.

NOAA recently highlighted a meaningful step forward: a new AIS (Automatic Identification System) messaging network feature that detects vessels exceeding speed limits in right whale zones and sends alerts directly to mariners’ navigation screens. In a recent field test, 83 percent of vessels slowed upon receiving an alert — a striking early result for a voluntary system.

At OCR, we’re working on the next layer of that problem. The NOAA system tells ships where speed restrictions apply. WISSP (Whale Identification for Ship Strike Prevention) aims to tell ships where individual whales are by detecting them acoustically in real time.

Using hydrophone arrays along shipping corridors and wavelet-based signal analysis, the system would transmit whale locations as AIS signals directly to navigation screens — a whale appearing on the bridge display much like another vessel.

WISSP’s first test deployment will take place in the Greater Farallones region, a biodiversity hotspot and one of the busiest maritime routes on the Pacific Coast. It is a fitting place to test whether dynamic whale detection can protect animals at one of the ocean’s most critical intersections of commerce and conservation.

The project is currently at proof-of-concept stage — and just became more relevant. NOAA’s advance notice of proposed rulemaking, published this month, invites public comment on whether real-time whale detection and alert systems could complement the current seasonal speed zone framework. A system like WISSP would give ships precise, actionable information about where individual whales are — benefiting both mariners and the fewer than 380 North Atlantic right whales remaining.

Public comments are open until June 2. 

Submit a Comment · View Our Quick Guide

Life Where the Sun Never Reaches

DISCOVERY & WONDER

A sea pig foraging the abyssal plain — one of thousands of species still waiting to be named

For most of human history, the deep ocean was treated as an absence.

Darkness, it turns out, was never an obstacle for evolution.

Around hydrothermal vents, microbes build food webs powered not by sunlight but by the planet itself. Across the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) between Hawaii and Mexico, life depends on marine snow — organic particles drifting down from the surface — sustaining organisms that have had millions of years of uninterrupted darkness to become something genuinely unfamiliar.

Last December, scientists published a five-year study in Nature Ecology and Evolution — the largest investigation yet of CCZ sediment life. Across 160 days at sea, they identified 788 species, most never previously described.

Two months after a commercial mining machine’s test run, animal abundance in its tracks had dropped 37% and species richness had fallen 32%. A separate Nature study found that impacts from a 1979 mining experiment were still detectable forty-four years later.

We are being asked to make industrial decisions about ecosystems we have documented for fewer than fifty years — in some cases fewer than five.

The UN High Seas Treaty entered into force in January 2026, giving science a formal role in decisions about international waters before they become irreversible. Knowing what is down there is where protection begins.

When Science Becomes Protection

SCIENCE → POLICY → PROTECTION

A humpback mother, calf, and escort — the social structure that gives recovery a shape. Photo by Rachel Moore

The Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), passed in 1972, established something rare: a precautionary baseline. Marine mammals, as a class, warranted protection from human-caused harm before a crisis forced the issue.

That shift happened because scientists, advocates, and citizens paid attention at the right moment and made it impossible to look away. In 2022, OCR helped produce a video series marking the MMPA’s 50th anniversary — reflections from scientists and nonprofits across the field that were shared widely across the marine conservation community.

Conservation laws often begin the moment the evidence becomes impossible to ignore. What is harder — and rarer — is building the legal architecture before the evidence becomes that extreme.

Both the MMPA and the Endangered Species Act (ESA) now face renewed pressure — and the record of what they made possible is clear. Since the MMPA passed, not a single marine mammal species in U.S. waters has gone extinct. The Central North Pacific humpback whale stock, reduced to around 1,400 individuals by the mid-1960s, had recovered to more than 21,000 by 2006. The ESA has prevented the extinction of an estimated 291 species, saving more than 99% of those under its protection.

The humpbacks came back. The species held. What made that possible was people who chose to pay attention, and laws that gave that attention somewhere to go.

A Note on Attention

A whale detected in a shipping lane.
A species named for the first time in ancient mud.
A comment submitted before a deadline that shapes what the law becomes next.

These are all signals.

Paying attention to them — and acting on what we find — is how the ocean’s story stays worth reading.

The post Bright News from the Blue | What We Choose to Pay Attention to appeared first on Ocean Noise.

Image: Jaimen Hudson

Welcome back to Bright News from the Blue. In times of fracture—when change outpaces adaptation—our attention returns to systems that have long navigated complexity without collapse. Across deep time, the ocean endures through evolutionary intelligence, shaped by coexistence and continuity rather than extraction and turnover.

What follows are three moments of discovery that invite closer listening—to how life organizes itself through culture, shared space, and renewal beneath the surface.

Documenting a Dialect: Iberian Orcas, Finally Heard

Power Spectral Density Percentiles

Orcas are the queens of the ocean—matriarchal, highly intelligent societies led by older females whose knowledge shapes survival across generations.

While orca dialects have been documented in populations around the world, the Iberian orca population—a small and critically endangered group living near the Strait of Gibraltar, more recently known for headline-making encounters with fishing boats—had not yet been formally described acoustically.

A new study published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering represents an initial step toward addressing this gap. Using passive acoustic monitoring, researchers tested a drifting acoustic buoy equipped with a broadband hydrophone, recording as it moved through one of the busiest maritime corridors in the world. Despite intense vessel traffic and noise, the system captured sufficient high-quality data to describe four distinct call types specific to this population, alongside low-frequency signals associated with fin whales and broadband clicks attributed to sperm whales in the area.

More than a technical milestone, the findings confirm that Iberian orcas maintain a population-specific acoustic identity—a cultural signature shaped by social structure, lineage, and shared experience. For a small and vulnerable group navigating sustained human pressure, documenting this dialect establishes a critical baseline: one that can help scientists recognize disruption, resilience, and change over time.

This matriarch-led social system has endured, with remarkably little change, for millions of years. Time has not argued with it.

When Fish Voices Come Into Focus

Image: Eiko Jones

Fishes perceive and respond to sound through external and internal sensory systems that detect vibration, particle motion, and pressure. What has remained difficult is determining which species produce which sounds in the wild, where attribution is complicated by overlapping calls, movement, and limited visual information.

A new study published in the Journal of Fish Biology demonstrates a practical advance. By pairing underwater audio recordings with synchronized video and machine-learning analysis, researchers were able to identify eight wild fish species by their vocalizations and develop a model capable of predicting which species is calling. Notably, the system distinguished several closely related demersal rockfish species—long considered difficult to separate acoustically—using species-specific “knocks” and “grunts.”

Identifying fish vocalizations at the species level brings new resolution to how marine soundscapes are understood. It allows ecological presence and change to be tracked in places where traditional surveys fall short, bringing fish into clearer focus within the ocean’s acoustic record.

A Season of Renewal for North Atlantic Right Whales

A North Atlantic right whale calf is a rare sight. Fewer than 380 individuals remain, with only about 70 reproductively active females.

Each winter, North Atlantic right whales return to the warm coastal waters of the southeastern United States to give birth and nurse their young. According to NOAA Fisheries, the 2026 calving season has documented 21 mother–calf pairs so far, making this the strongest count at this point in more than a decade.

Calving seasons like this make visible the conditions that care and restraint allow. When space is held—temporally and geographically—life persists. Progress takes the form of presence: a calf at the surface, a lineage extended, a future briefly within reach.

Across the ocean, continuity emerges again and again through culture, coexistence, and renewal. Ocean Conservation Research will continue to hold space for that continuity.

The post Bright News from the Blue | Continuity Beneath the Surface appeared first on Ocean Noise.

Don’t say “fire.”

It has been our policy to only comment on policy issues that directly intersect ocean health and management. So while the “word purge” that occurred in the opening salvo of the current administration – e.g. “DEI,” “Gay,” “LGBT,” “African American,” “Slavery,” etc., I figured there were enough opinions flying around that we didn’t need to add to the fray. (Although I did find it amusing that the Government information pages on the Enola Gay were taken down…)

But their next purge does intersect our ocean concerns. The Department of Energy (DOE) wants to excise terms like “climate change,” “green,” “clean/dirty energy,” “emissions,” “carbon/CO2 footprint,” and “decarbonization.”

The DOE director of external affairs Rachel Overbey stated “Please ensure that every member of your team is aware that this is the latest list of words to avoid – and continue to be conscientious about avoiding any terminology that you know to be misaligned with the Administration’s perspectives and priorities.”

Of course while this is just a DOE directive, But like the use of terms like “DEI” and “Slavery,” soon enough these words and phrases will become the search terms for determining if schools, businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations are “terrorists.”

Which brings us to the shutdown.

Today the President is set to meet with Congressional leaders to “try to work out a deal” on the coming government shutdown. The problem with this “dealmaking” is that one party wants to avoid a shutdown, the other wants our government to crash.

When the house is burning down, don’t say “fire.”

The post Don’t say “Fire.” appeared first on Ocean Noise.

….nothing to see here….

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) just let us know that there will be no public review of a pending environmental study of oil leasing in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. The original Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) issued in 2022 was found faulty, calling on a review and revision of the 2022 EIS, and a reissue of a “Supplemental” EIS. This EIS will bypass public review and comment, so we just got to trust them on this, I guess…

Public review is the heart of the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) which was “streamlined” by the last Trump Administration, released in December 2020, at the closing moments of their previous chaos. We submitted fairly comprehensive comments to the 2020 revisions, anticipating that a lot of the hideous revisions would be retracted or rolled back by the Biden Administration. This was only partially the case; some of the 2020 revisions remained.

That notwithstanding, apparently the current administration’s interpretation of NEPA is that their revisions of the Supplemental EIS’s don’t get reviewed again, because “The Court responded and revised the document appropriately to the public and stakeholder’s interests.”

Most of the Cook Inlet environmental concerns orbit around the Beluga whales, of which only about 300 remain. So for me this puts in place NOAA’s severance of Manolo Castellote – one of the world’s preeminent marine mammalogists, who has been studying the Cook Inlet Beluga whales for the last 15 years. I originally thought his ‘termination’ was just more “DOGE” cannon fodder. Now it seems that it was part of the plan. (Exactly who drew up the proposed “environmental study” anyway?)

We have not yet seen how the current administration has synthesized any of the EIS comments we submitted this year; the revised 5-year offshore leasing plan, the Seabed mining request, and rescinding the word “Harm” from the Endangered Species Act, but given their proclivity to pushing the envelope to see what they can get away with, my suspicions are that they will ignore all public input and just see what we’ll do about it.

The post What’s next? appeared first on Ocean Noise.

19th Century Factory Tuwn

I sort of lose track of these “flood the zone” things, but after Labor Day’s cancellation of Government Worker’s collective bargaining rights, Tuesday’s Three Alarm Fire was the  revocation of  offshore wind leases along the Atlantic. Most remarkably the Revolution Wind project, which was 80% complete – with 100% of the turbine bases in place and 70% of the turbines mounted and ready to spin.

Halting the Revolution Wind project arrests some 2000-3000 jobs, dead-ends a few $Billion Dollars invested by Oersted, the project developer, and flummoxes nine years of various Agency evaluations, approvals, and permits from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), Department of the Interior, NOAA Fisheries (NMFS), Department of Defense (DOD), and probably scads of State agencies who also have a hand in approving the landing of offshore energy into the States of Connecticut and Rhode Island  – where it was slated to power some 500,000 homes.

I’m not sure how orders come from above in this administration, but the roll-out of this “Emergency” was a bit sloppy. Aside from the nine-year regulatory ramp-up being disrupted on Tuesday, some of the reasons given for why it was hastily cancelled don’t even honor the word “specious.”

Probably the most amusing for me was from Doug Bergum – now the Secretary of the Department of the Interior claiming that he was concerned about the turbine’s interference with radar, compromising the DOD’s ability to monitor underwater attack drones. A bit of a reach, as radar – while compromised by dozens to hundreds of spinning turbine blades across the horizon, has absolutely nothing to do with underwater reconnaissance.

This is what happens when you hire propagandists and politicians – who are great at inflaming controversy, to do jobs that require achieving stable solutions.

This is also setting up another disaster: Just as the use of “Artificial Intelligence” is expanding exponentially, scuttling clean energy projects, or any energy projects for that matter, can only result in the US driving full speed into an energy shortage.

Server Farms are being proposed (and developed) that consume stunning amounts of energy. Each text query consumes between 0.25 Watt/hours to 0.34 Watt/hours. Image generation takes six times that, and short videos can eat up 100Watt/hours. Meta is planning a data center in Louisiana that will consume three times the entire energy use of the city of New Orleans.

This is really not the best time to pull long-planned power generation projects offline. It is bound to kick the US back into the “Dark Ages.”

But maybe this is the real point?

The post appeared first on Ocean Noise.

It is not a surprise, but rather shocking how the current administration is eviscerating our national regulatory agencies, and doing it in what may appear to lay audiences as “sensible.”

The current arena is the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) and Endangered Species Act (ESA). In the same sort of twisted logic that frames “DEI” (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) as “racism against white heterosexual men,” the existing bills are being jerked around under the rubric of “scientific accuracy.”

For over 50 years the MMPA has proven to be the most successful Regulatory Act ever passed. The testimony to this is in both the recovery of so many whale populations (after 200 years of commercial whaling), and the fact that none of these populations have gone extinct. So why would you want to change that?

The foundation of the MMPA is that as humans industrialize the ocean, there will be unfavorable interactions with marine mammals. The gist of the effort is to anticipate those interactions and reduce mortalities to the greatest extent possible. So there are considerations for maintaining “Optimum Sustainable Populations” of the various impacted species under the rubric of “Potential Biological Removal,” or “PBR” – how many animals might be “taken” and still have the population recover.

So in addition to calculating the population densities, there are regulatory tools such as “Incidental Harassment Authorizations” for behavioral disruptions, and “Incidental Take Permits” for ‘permissible’ mortalities that will still maintain sustainable populations.

The calculations for the authorizations are somewhat arcane, and based mostly on expert advice of marine mammalogists who have expertise in the respective species in the subject area of concern.

The suggested “tweaks” are too numerous to detail here, but they include “scientifically accurate population counts” which are really not easily ascertained, and excluding protections if the number is “unknown” (because without a number, the “PBR” is impossible to calculate); ambiguating or excluding mortalities caused by things like habitat destruction, and replacing the regulatory definition of “serious injury” (an injury with a greater than 50 percent chance of death) with a statutory definition requiring a greater than 75% likelihood of death.

Nice guys…

If you want to get a more detailed description, NRDC has a deeper level of analysis; and once we critique the proposed changes, we’ll circulate our submission.

What we don’t know is whether this administration will pay any attention to all of our various comments. When I first got into this business, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) stipulated that all public comments needed to be considered, and any revisions made to address the comments needed to be annotated in the final document.

NEPA has been significantly watered down since then, and we have not seen how the current administration has synthesized any of our comments this year – the revised 5-year offshore leasing plan, the Seabed mining request, and rescinding the word “Harm” from the Endangered Species Act. But dollars-to-donuts they will likely ignore the thousands of public comments, and the proposed revisions will need to be pounded out in court.

The post Regulatory disruption appeared first on Ocean Noise.

(a–c) actiniarians; (d–f) alcyonacean corals;(g) antipatharian coral; (h–l) hexactinellid sponges.

Copyright: ROV Kiel 6000 Team/ GEOMAR Kiel.

The post Seabed mining is sneaking up on us appeared first on Ocean Noise.

This time I didn’t feel the need – as explained somewhat in the letter. We know that if they decide to run with this plan, despite stiff opposition and public disapproval, they will use it to give the oilmen very lenient leases and block out offshore wind leasing areas.

We also know that they plan on leasing in the National Marine Sanctuaries – if for no other reason than to get in our faces – because getting in our faces is what seems to be driving a lot of the Administration’s policies at present.

You can submit your comments here: https://www.regulations.gov/document/BOEM-2025-0015-0003

You don’t need to get too complicated. But the deadline is 11:59pm, Monday June 16

Thanks for your interest!

Michael Stocker

Short letter on the plan:

Ms. Kelly Hammerle, BOEM

Re: Comments for the 11th National OCS Oil and Gas Leasing Program

Dear Ms. Hammerle,

There was much work done by many in writing the 10th National OCS Oil and Gas Leasing Program for 2024 – 2029[1]. There was also a lot of work done in reviewing, critiquing, and revising the plan, which was approved in December of 2023 and reflected the needs of our economy, our environment, and the desires of the American People. So throwing all of those efforts out a year later so as to hew to the desires of the Administration shows deep disrespect for all of those who worked so hard on getting 2024 five-year plan approved.

The 2024 plan also reflected the public sentiment on offshore oil extraction after the complete failure of the Trump 2017 “drill on all coasts” leasing plan, which was rejected by 400 Atlantic municipalities, 58,000 businesses on the Atlantic, Pacific & Florida Gulf coasts, 500,000 fishing families and 2,300 elected officials representing both major political parties, and of course the American people.[2]

This was on the heels of the much more modest 2012-2017 five-year leasing plan, reflecting the public’s desire to bring down greenhouse gas contributions in concern for the expanding climate disaster we are facing from over a 100 years of reckless hydrocarbon expansion.

And while the Administration seems all jacked up on their “Drill, Baby, Drill” battle cry, even the oil industry is not focused on expanding their extraction operations. This is evidenced by the fact that of the 12 million acres leased to them in the Gulf of Mexico, only 20% are under production.[3] Over-producing fossil fuel does not really play to the advantage of the industry, who would rather keep prices above $65/bbl.

While Donald Trump is attempting to bully EU nations into buying our hydrocarbon overproduction, developing and producing offshore hydrocarbon extraction operations is exceedingly expensive for the industry, both in terms of time, and money. I suspect industry managers are weighing in the 10-year future where, depending on which way the political winds blow, they may be restricted from production due to the nation, and the world, having to finally face the realities of the expanding global climate disaster.

So Donald Trump’s declaration of an “Energy Emergency” is just another disruptive, manufactured crisis designed to set everyone off-balance to advantage wealthy players who are in on their inside game, at the expense of all other people – Americans, as well as world citizens, who all continue to suffer at the instability driven by these antics.

The 2025, 11th National OCS Oil and Gas Leasing Program is just an artifact of this, and should not be encouraged.

Sincerely,

Michael Stocker

Director

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