Threats posed to Marine Life in the Western Indian Ocean from Anthropogenic Ocean Noise and Shipping, including Ship strikes

Questions and concerns about the effects of human introduction of noise into the marine environment on increasingly large scales are well-founded. Major progress has been made in understanding how animals hear and may be impacted by noise. While overall amplitude is clearly relevant in terms of how sounds in the ocean may affect animals, other aspects of sound, such as frequency, directionality, duration, novelty, and other factors can be as or even more important (e.g., Ellison et al., 2012).