From “the ocean called and they’re running out of quiet shrimp” department comes this pointless excuse for using grant money. Science spoiler alert: cold blooded animals get more active when they are warmer. Call the Nobel committee!
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, SAN DIEGO–One of the ocean’s loudest creatures is smaller than you’d expect–and will get even louder and more troublesome to humans and sea life as the ocean warms, according to new research presented here at the Ocean Sciences Meeting 2020.
Snapping shrimp create a pervasive background crackling noise in the marine environment. Scientists suspect the sound helps the shrimp communicate, defend territories and hunt for food. When enough shrimp snap at once, the noise can dominate the soundscape of coastal oceans, sometimes confusing sonar instruments. Listen to snapping shrimp sounds here: https://youtu.be/1Y9IhiSk-Pk
Researchers will present new results Friday at the Ocean Sciences Meeting 2020 suggesting that with increased ocean temperatures, snapping shrimp will snap more often and louder than before. This could amplify the background noise, or soundscape, of the global ocean, with implications for marine life and humans.
“It’s a really cool little animal,” said Aran Mooney, a marine biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who will present the work. “They’re a crustacean, kind of like a little shrimp or lobster. They make a sound by like closing a claw so fast it makes this bubble and when that bubble implodes, it makes that snapping sound.”
Mooney and his colleague Ashlee Lillis detected a strong relationship between warmer waters and louder, more frequent snapping shrimp sounds by experimenting with shrimp in tanks in their lab and by listening to shrimp in the ocean at different water temperatures.
“As you increase that temperature, snap rates increase,” Mooney said.
This makes sense because shrimp are essentially cold-blooded animals, meaning their body temperature and activity levels are largely controlled by their environment, in the same way ants can move faster in warmer weather than in cool weather.
“We can actually show in the field that not only does snap rate increase, but the sound levels increase as well,” Mooney said. “So the seas are actually getting louder as water, warmer temperatures.”
Louder snapping shrimp could potentially have harmful effects on fish and even sonar used by submarines and ships.
“We know that fish use sound to communicate,” Mooney said. “Fish call each other, and they make sounds to attract mates and for territorial defense. If the seas get louder, it has the potential to influence those communications. We don’t really know that yet. That’s something we have to follow up on.”
Human use of sound in the oceans might also be impaired by very loud snapping shrimp. Common instruments like sonar fish finders might be affected, Mooney said. There is also the possibility louder seas could affect instruments the Navy uses to detect mines, which could have implications for national defense, he said.
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Mark Lee
February 19, 2020 at 12:28 pm
– “Sounds like there is potential to use the shrimp noise to detect submarines. Similar to the way civilian electromagnetic emissions can be used to detect stealth aircraft.
Quite right and that’s presumably good news for the military.
– And if : “Common instruments like sonar fish finders might be affected, Mooney said.”
Presumably that’ s good news for the fish too.
Also if
Add it to the 97 percent pile. Science and shrimp have something in common. Both are bought by the pound
At first I thought the headline was about Michael Bloomberg.
Who needs thermometers? Just use water-tight microphones indeed. Now there’s a new temperature proxy. Shrimp noise spectrum instead of thermometers. Obviously more grants are needed for the establishments of precise calibration charts.
Can’t stop science.
Next:
Yes why bother with expensive equipment, remote stations, satellites… when you have ice, trees and shrimps.
Hopefully, CAGW will cause garlic and butter production to get louder to balance things out. 😉
Boiling Shrimps makes them really snappy.
Amid all this talk of insect apocalypse, biodiversity crisis and looming extinction, an actual scientific study by the NERC on 5000+ species of invertebrates and plants (plus mosses, lichens etc) finds that between 1970 and 2015, biodiversity has increased in the UK. There has been on average an 11% increase of habitat range.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200217112736.htm
CAGW is a death cult. Looking at life they see only death.
A copperhead snake will bite your ass quicker when it’s 95F than when it’s 65F. 98.6F may be the optimum temp for life on Earth. Anyway, don’t kiss a copperhead on a hot day!
I meant this as a reply to Phil Salmon with regards to a cold blooded species being more active with warmer temperature.
Anyway, a loud shrimp will attend a lunch buffet with a predator much sooner!
So, are we also going be deafened by louder and more frequent cicadas?
The cicadas on our east coast are already deafening, like 100dB more!
With any luck these noisy shrimp will be killed off by ocean acidification and the noise will be gone for good.
The increasing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) has been driving all marine organisms to live in increasingly acidic environments. In the present study, we evaluated the long-term effects of increased seawater CO2 on survival of marine shrimp. Survival was significantly suppressed; final survival rates were 55% (experimental) vs. 90% (control)
{ Kurihara, Haruko, et al. “Long-term effects of predicted future seawater CO2 conditions on the survival and growth of the marine shrimp” Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology 367.1 2008}
Pretty sure louder shrimps is major gift to Putin’s submarines and makes it even more likely that after Ukraine, the Russian BUKs will drive on US soil because Trump delayed the anti-tanks missiles for a month or something.
So minimizing climate globul change is a gift to Russia and goes against the inter agencies consensus.
All roads lead to Putin.
I was just thinking about the phenomenon of little critters making big noise, and I recalled one lecture in which it was asserted that what is called a frog chorus, when frogs emerge from hibernation following a big rain after a prolonged dry period, that these frog choruses as they are called are literally “the loudest sound in nature”.
I can say that, with having heard only the ones that occur in Florida in person, that they are amazingly loud.
But I have never heard the sound of an entire herd of elephants stomping and trumpeting through a forest, or that of a V7 volcanic eruption, but I am pretty sure those may be louder.
Now I know what that noise is that has been keeping me up at night! LOUD SHRMP!
It’s really difficult to discern between stupid and deceit nowadays. But I can’t help thinking this kind of stupid that comes up so often is an intentional distraction to get skeptics riled up for fun. It’s difficult to let go of the denial that prevents some of us from admitting our fellow man could be this stupid.