This is a

scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Baluga whales rely on a sharp sense of hearing

to communicate, to navigate, and to feed.

But the ocean is a noisy place.

There's commercial shipping, there's Navy sonar, oil and gas extraction, pile driving,

underwater explosions.

So one way to tell if all that noise is affecting Belugas,

capture them for a routine physical.

So it's kind of like going to the doctor's office for them,

but they're sort of also a bit abducted by aliens at the same time.

Aaron Mooney, a marine biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

He and his team captured 26 Belugas in Alaska's Bristol Bay for a battery of checkups, including a hearing test.

We can play a very controlled design sound of the animal, a hearing test tone.

Then they measured the bluga's brain response using an electrode on the

animal's head. The diagnosis... They're doing fantastic and they're you know they're

better than what we thought they were going to be. And older Belas seem to have less age-related hearing loss than

aging dolphins screened in previous studies. The full bill of health is in the Journal of

Experimental biology. These Belugas do live in a relatively pristine environment, which might explain why they aced the hearing test. Animals in noisier waters might not fare so well, moony says, and the same might go for Belugas as the volume slowly rises in the

underwater Arctic.

Thanks for listening. For Scientific American 60 Second Science, I'm Christopher and Thadiata.

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