Solar Storms Can Mess With Whales' Ability To Navigate, Cause Strandings (cnet.com) 18
The ocean's most mammoth, docile beasts manage to find their way around the oceans with relative ease. And that's especially true for the gray whale, a creature that makes the biggest migration of any mammal, traveling over 12,000 kilometers (7,500 miles) across the planet to feed and breed. New research suggests gray whales may navigate with a kind of seventh sense that allows them to detect variations in the Earth's magnetic field -- and this sense can be adversely affected by the sun. From a report: Gray whales are about as long as a school bus and six times heavier than an African elephant. They communicate using low-frequency sounds and navigate the oceans without the help of GPS. In a study published in the journal Current Biology on Monday, researchers examined 186 strandings of gray whales reported between 1985 and 2018. To try to tighten up the data set and remove some variables, the team looked at strandings of whales that were stranded alive with "no signs of injury, illness, emaciation or human interaction." The strandings were then correlated with various measures of solar activity: how many sunspots were present, changes in the Earth's magnetic field and solar radio flux, which is determined by radio frequency noise and has shown to correlate well with sunspot numbers and be affected by solar storms.
Bitcoin (Score:2, Funny)
Is that why the price is so volatile?
Re: (Score:2)
Only for clients that implement Blockchain on Whale Packet Protocol.
Seventh sense? (Score:3)
The big news here isn't that whales can sense EMF, it's that they're psychic.
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They knew you were going to say that.
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*Disclaimer:not disagreeing with your point, just saying saying 'sense of' is a poor metric =P
"Seventh sense" (Score:2)
Sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, temperature, proprioception, pain, itch, pressure, tension, balance, movement, velocity, stretch, thirst, hunger, time, electroception, and magnetoreception are the senses humans have off the top of my head, so whales are functionally incapable of perceiving their environment or themselves if they only have seven.
Not sure (Score:2)
In Vegas they like it when whales strand at the roulette table.
Atlantis (Score:2)
Also it causes the whales to hide underneath Atlantis to benefit from it's shield.
You mean it's not sonar? (Score:3)
In the 90's, it was reported that beached whales were spotted where the US Navy submarines had been conducting training exercises. Someone put two and two together and figured that you could locate the approximate location of US ballistic missile submarines by observing the location of the beached whales, and since that time, the Navy stopped using active sonar so close to shore.
Yes, it was probably good PR for the Navy, but it was also the fact that revealing the location of a strategic asset was likely a very bad thing(TM) for national security.
It was likewise reported that whale beachings had significantly dropped since then; has the Navy decided to start using active sonar again, publishing a study like this to disguise the real reason for the beachings?
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has the Navy decided to start using active sonar again, publishing a study like this to disguise the real reason for the beachings?
The article specifically addresses this. The researchers excluded from their study any beachings that had known or high likelyhood known causes (such as injury or malnutrition). Additionally, they mention that gray whales (the species studied) don't navigate the world based on sonar; and they discuss a recent beaching of a different type of whale that does use sonar and attribute it to US navy war games conducted at the time.
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In the 90's, it was reported that beached whales were spotted where the US Navy submarines had been conducting training exercises. Someone put two and two together and figured that you could locate the approximate location of US ballistic missile submarines by observing the location of the beached whales,
I also heard they had to give up a very good synthetic aperture sonar because its powerful "chirp" was enough like the mating call of a sea mammal (walrus maybe?) that when it was operating the submarine w
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electric sense? (Score:2)
Whales are large enough that swimming through the Earth's magnetic field might induce a large enough voltage to trigger an electric sensor (like sharks use to detect muscle and wound voltages from prey). Perhaps they use that for a compass (both direction and dipping-needle latitude measurement).
If they do, the voltages induced by the motion of the field from things like solar flares and other solar wind variations would be expected to overwhelm it, deafening them to the true signal.
They'd likely also be a
nonsense. (Score:1)
They also mess with Earth weather (Score:2)
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Yes, due to the overwhelming scientific consensus.