Abstract
Sea otters are threatened marine mammals that may be negatively impacted by human-generated coastal noise, yet information about sound reception in this species is surprisingly scarce. We investigated amphibious hearing in sea otters by obtaining the first measurements of absolute sensitivity and critical masking ratios. Auditory thresholds were measured in air and underwater from 0.125 to 40 kHz. Critical ratios derived from aerial masked thresholds from 0.25 to 22.6 kHz were also obtained. These data indicate that although sea otters can detect underwater sounds, their hearing appears to be primarily air adapted and not specialized for detecting signals in background noise.
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Acknowledgments
This work was conducted with permission of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (Permit MA186914-1) and the University of California, Santa Cruz Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. Support was provided by the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Energy and Environmental Readiness Division (N45) and Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) Atlantic through HDR Environmental, Operations and Construction, Inc.; the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management; the Packard Ocean Sciences Endowment at the University of California, Santa Cruz; the Sea Otter Research and Conservation Program at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Monterey, CA; and the Aquarium of the Pacific, Long Beach, CA.
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Ghoul, A., Reichmuth, C. (2016). Auditory Sensitivity and Masking Profiles for the Sea Otter (Enhydra lutris). In: Popper, A., Hawkins, A. (eds) The Effects of Noise on Aquatic Life II. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 875. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2981-8_41
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2981-8_41
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