Conferences Attended BPS director Greg Butcher attended the meeting of the American Ornithologists' Union, held July 24-28 in Ames, Iowa. In June 1992, Bioacoustics Research Program director Christopher Clark attended the International Whaling Commission Scientific Meeting in Glasgow, Scotland. The meeting focused on the growing schism between the scientific community, which collects data on several species of whales, and nations that want to resume commercial whaling. Clark's collaborator is Thomas Park, an electrical engineering professor at Cornell University. Oceanographers from the Scripps Institute in San Diego plan to measure ocean temperatures by generating very loud sounds underwater and measuring how fast they travel across ocean basins.
Temperature affects the speed at which sound travels through water.
The powerful sounds from ATOC, however, could disrupt the behavior of whales, which use loud, low-frequency sounds to communicate over long distances. All whales are protected under the Marine Mammals Act and the Environmental Protection Act. Clark plans to monitor whales in the presence and absence of the ATOC sounds from field sites in Hawaii and California, using hydrophone arrays and techniques for tracking sounds in the open ocean. Clark's collaborators in this project are Christopher Heegard from Cornell University and Bruce Mate from Oregon State University. BRP has received three additional grants this past year.