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Harbour seals avoid tidal turbine noise: implications for collision risk

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-08-10, 11:02 authored by Gordon D. Hastie, Deborah J.F. Russell, Paul LepperPaul Lepper, Jim Elliott, Ben Wilson, Steven Benjamins, Dave Thompson
1. Tidal stream energy converters (turbines) are currently being installed in tidally energetic coastal sites. However, there is currently a high level of uncertainty surrounding the potential environmental impacts on marine mammals. This is a key consenting risk to commercial introduction of tidal energy technology. Concerns derive primarily from the potential for injury to marine mammals through collisions with moving components of turbines. To understand the nature of this risk, information on how animals respond to tidal turbines is urgently required. 2. We measured the behaviour of harbour seals in response to acoustic playbacks of simulated tidal turbine sound within a narrow coastal channel subject to strong, tidally induced currents. This was carried out using data from animal-borne GPS tags and shore-based observations, which were analysed to quantify behavioural responses to the turbine sound. 3. Results showed that the playback state (silent control or turbine signal) was not a significant predictor of the overall number of seals sighted within the channel. 4. However, there was a localised impact of the turbine signal; tagged harbour seals exhibited significant spatial avoidance of the sound which resulted in a reduction in the usage by seals of between 11 and 41% at the playback location. The significant decline in usage extended to 500 m from the playback location at which usage decreased by between 1 and 9% during playback. Synthesis and applications: This study provides important information for policy makers looking to assess the potential impacts of tidal turbines and advise on development of the tidal energy industry. Results showing that seals avoid tidal turbine sound suggest that a proportion of seals encountering tidal turbines will exhibit behavioural responses resulting in avoidance of physical injury; in practice, the empirical changes in usage can be used directly as avoidance rates when using collision risk models to predict the effects of tidal turbines on seals. There is now a clear need to measure how marine mammals behave in response to actual operating tidal turbines in the long term to learn whether marine mammals and tidal turbines can co-exist safely at the scales currently envisaged for the industry.

Funding

The work was funded by the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and Department of the Environment Food and Rural Affairs (RESPONSE project, NE/J004251/1). It was also supported by NERC National Capability funding to the Sea Mammal Research Unit (grant no. SMRU1001).

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

Journal of Applied Ecology

Volume

55

Issue

2

Pages

684-693

Citation

HASTIE, G.D. ... et al, 2018. Harbour seals avoid tidal turbine noise: implications for collision risk. Journal of Applied Ecology, 55(2), pp. 684-693.

Publisher

© The Authors. Journal of Applied Ecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-07-21

Publication date

2017-09-15

Copyright date

2018

Notes

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ISSN

0021-8901

eISSN

1365-2664

Language

  • en