$9.5M underwater listening station to monitor Salish Sea as part of federal whale initiative


READ MORE

Federal Transport Minister Marc Garneau spent some of his time in Vancouver on Thursday behind a podium touting a new $9.5 million underwater listening station.


The new hydrophones will be installed in Boundary Pass near Saturna Island, with the goal of monitoring the underwater noise that endangered southern resident killer whales are regularly subjected to.


Minister of Transport Marc Garneau speaks to media in Vancouver on Thursday. Garneau announced details of a new underwater listening station to monitor shipping noise in the Salish Sea. (Rafferty Baker/CBC)


“Marine noise levels can affect killer whales’ ability to hunt and communicate,” said Garneau, adding that the new listening station will detect and measure vessel noise, marine mammal data and ambient noise data.


But the announcement wasn’t exactly new. In June, the federal government announced its $167.4 million ‘Whales Initiative,’ and the project detailed on Thursday is included in that plan.


Christianne Wilhelmson, executive director of the conservation group, Georgia Strait Alliance, had a mixed reaction to the Boundary Pass listening station project.


“We’re all for research, but basically this won’t change anything for the orcas when they return in May,” said Wilhelmson. “Their environment will still be noisy. We still don’t have targets — we don’t know how quiet we want the Salish Sea to be.”


She wants to see more action on protecting chinook salmon habitat, which would benefit orcas. Wilhelmson also wanted to see a vessel speed trial in Haro Strait made permanent.


“There have been several announcements over the past many months about hydrophones. It’s a good thing, having infrastructure in place so we can know where the orcas are, so we can learn more about them, particularly in the area where [vessel] slow-downs have been trialled,” said Wilhelmson.


Transportation Minister Marc Garneau speaks to Lance Barrett-Lennard, director of marine mammal research at Oceanwise. Barrett-Lennard had just demonstrated a hydrophone in Vancouver’s busy port, showing Garneau the amount of noise pollution underwater. (Rafferty Baker/CBC)


But she said Garneau’s announcement on Thursday was “not an announcement of action.”


Garneau said in his remarks that the voluntary ship slow-down trial in the Haro Strait worked very well, and it would be continued in the future. That trial is now over for the year, as the southern resident killer whales have left the area.


Follow Rafferty Baker on Twitter: @raffertybaker




Article source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/house-of-cards-real-politics-drama-1.4133554?cmp=rss


Best Wordpress Plugin development company in India     Best Web development company in India

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Canadian expected to be aboard Russia's 1st manned space mission since rocket failure

READ MORE The first manned mission to the International Space Station since a Russian rocket failed to launch successfully earlier this month may take off on Dec. 3, space agency Roscosmos said on Wednesday. And the crew is expected to include Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques, Agence France-Press reported. A Russian cosmonaut and U.S. astronaut were forced to abort their mission on Oct. 11 and perform an emergency landing after a launch accident that Roscomos said was caused by a faulty sensor. The accident was the first serious launch problem experienced by a manned Soyuz space mission since 1983, when a crew narrowly escaped before a launch pad explosion. Sergei Krikalyov, a senior Roscosmos official, was quoted by state news agency Tass as saying the next manned launch had been planned for mid-December, but that Russia was trying to bring the date forward so that the ISS is not briefly left without a crew. “The industry is making significant efforts to move the launch t...
Read more

Getting the dope on pot stocks is becoming easier as media groups invest in content: Don Pittis

Image
READ MORE “What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s happening,” goes the ’70s rock anthem. Part of the catchiness of the lyric — from the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar  — was that in that era the term “buzz” had developed a second spicy meaning. It described the high that people got from smoking cannabis. In the 1970s, the magazine High Times was a brand new title keeping an eye on the illegal but growing business of marijuana pricing and sales. It ran centrefolds of glistening pot plants and of an apartment filled to the windows with what the magazine insisted was an entire ton of cannabis. Now some of Canada’s most staid media voices are looking for ways to go toe to toe with High Times and its U.S. competitors, hoping to profit from Canada’s global head start in legal recreational cannabis. But when it comes to making a killing from spreading the buzz on the cannabis biz, to q...
Read more

Toronto man denies conspiring with Marvel CEO in alleged hate mail scheme

Image
READ MORE A Toronto man accused of conspiring with the head of Marvel Entertainment in a bizarre hate mail campaign against his wealthy former employer has denied any role in the alleged scheme. David Smith, along with Marvel CEO Isaac (Ike) Perlmutter, is the target of a slander lawsuit launched earlier this year by Canadian businessman Harold Peerenboom. Now Smith — a former employee of Peerenboom’s Toronto-based executive search firm, Mandrake Management — has filed a motion to dismiss the U.S. civil suit. It’s the latest development in the years-long legal battle between Peerenboom and Perlmutter, a notoriously reclusive American billionaire and personal friend of U.S. President Donald Trump. The hate mail campaign, which ran   between 2012 to 2015, saw anonymous letters falsely accusing Peerenboom of being a child molester, murderer and anti-Semite...
Read more