Search Results for: Whales

Manatee and whale woes with boat speed limits

This isn’t a cop convention. These are marine mammal biologists, but they do care about speed limits. At the 18th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals, Science News reporter Susan Milius blogs about manatee researcher Edmund Gerstein's work on boat speeds and gory collisions with manatees. Gerstein is the guy at this meeting who has been arguing what sounds just backward at first. In circumstances such as murky water, he says, slow boats are more likely to hit manatees than are fast boats: Slow boats don’t make as much noise within the manatee hearing range, he says. So when manatees have to rely on sound to detect boats, the animals don’t pick up the warning until too late. There's also news on how well -- or not well -- speed limits set for boats that frequent the same waters as right whales are being followed.