Over the last two years, there’s been a very interesting exploration of how successfully harbour porpoises forage and what the implications are for their vulnerability or ability to tolerate disturbance. Here we’re going to take a bit of a ‘deep dive’ to explore what it all means. […]
We’re excited to see two new papers published in Aquatic Mammals journal, furthering our knowledge of porpoise health, energetics and the effects of exposure to pile-driving noise. […]
Given our projects in the North Sea and our work on Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) and with the development of the iPCoD framework, we’re always particularly interested when new research comes to light on how porpoises respond to noise. Today is one such day of interest! […]
Its been a busy year for the SMRU Consulting North America team. But, we are ending the year on a high with the publication of two recent reports and the preliminary results of the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority’s vessel Slowdown trial. The preliminary results of the Slowdown trial and our reports on the effects of noise [...]
As we close out another really good year for the company, working with great clients, funders and collaborators, it seemed like a good time for the team to look inside and reflect on how we can work together even better and more efficiently! […]
Collaborative research conducted by the SMRU Asia Pacific team was recently published as the Editors Choice in the ICES Journal of Marine Science (IJMS). The research described how the noises made by chorusing fish can help identify the foraging habitat of the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin (Sousa chinensis) in the Pearl River Estuary, southern China. […]
In 2015 Andrew Wright from Environmental Science and Policy, George Mason University, VA, wrote; “Establishing noise exposure criteria for marine mammals has proven to be a difficult and contentious issue”. […]
A really interesting study from our colleagues at the Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU), the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, and TNO has explored how effective the sonar mitigation known as ‘ramp-up’ is for humpback whales. […]
An important predator in Scottish coastal waters, the east coast bottlenose dolphin has been studied for almost 30 years. In that time the marine landscape has changed dramatically with marine industrial activities and the construction and operation of offshore windfarms. […]
Having a British base for SMRU Consulting Europe means some of us are a bit preoccupied with the weather. And sometimes it even affects our jobs. Visually detecting animals in low visibility conditions can be challenging – and that affects our ability to monitor populations and mitigate impacts. So how do we improve detection performance in [...]
New publication now available: Tollit, D.J., L. Fritz, R. Joy, K. Miller, A. Schulze, J. Thomason, W. Walker, T. Zeppelin, T.S. Gelatt (2017). Diet of endangered Steller sea lions in the Aleutian Islands: New insights from DNA detections and bio-energetic reconstructions. Canadian Journal of Zoology 95(11): 853–868, year 2017, doi: 10.1139/cjz-2016-0253. The western stock of Steller [...]
In just under 60 years the Vaquita has gone from newly discovered species to the brink of extinction. This Gulf of California porpoise is rare, tiny and elusive and the most critically endangered marine mammal in the world. VaquitaCPR is a plan to save the species. […]
This week sees members of our Europe, Asia Pacific and North America teams attending the 22nd Biennial Conference of the Biology of Marine Mammals (the SMM for short). […]
The East Coast Marine Mammal Acoustics Study (ECOMMAS) is a long-term project where acoustic data has been collected on dolphins and porpoise round the east coast of Scotland. Marine Scotland have just released the CPOD data collected between 2013 and 2016. […]
We are thrilled to announce the release of the new interim PCoD code (v3.0) on the Marine Scotland website. […]
This week we are hosting a PCoD workshop! This workshop will be for PCoD+ to develop a PCoD Decision Framework. […]
Great to see our work with SMRU on the EOWDC bottlenose dolphin project has been highlighted in an article in the Power & Energy Solutions Wind Magazine here. […]
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On Monday morning 4 September, we got word that the Southern Resident killer whales were inbound from the Pacific Ocean. It had been over a month since members of this endangered killer whale population had been seen in the Salish Sea. […]
We are now half way through the vessel slow down trial in the Salish Sea. This study with the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, aims to understand how slowing ocean-going vessels will reduce ship noise in Southern Resident killer whale habitat. This is the first study of its kind to take place and has huge potential as [...]
