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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Slower boat speeds reduce risks to manatees. Or do they? Not exactly, according to research conducted at Florida Atlantic University. In fact, the very laws enacted to slow down boats in manatee habitats may actually be doing more harm than good. However, an innovative alerting device is proving to deliver a better solution.
About 100 manatees are killed each year by boats, making it the leading cause of death for this species. Not only are they hit frequently, they are hit repeatedly and have the scars to prove it. It is often thought that's because these gentle giants move too slowly to get out of harm's way or perhaps they are not smart enough to know better.
Not true according to Edmund Gerstein, Ph.D., director of marine mammal research in FAU's Charles E. Schmidt College of Science and his wife Laura, who have spent the last 20 years researching manatees to get to the root of this problem and to dispel these myths. What they have discovered is that manatees have difficulty hearing and locating low frequency sounds like the humming of an idling engine or a slow moving boat. Shallow and murky waters further exacerbate this problem and make boats both acoustically and visually invisible to unwary manatees.
"The idea of slowing down boats to protect manatees might make us feel better, but it has direct acoustic consequences in shallow water that place manatees at greater risk of collisions," said Edmund Gerstein. "While a slow speed zone may reduce the chance of death during a collision, they have not mitigated the number of collisions that kill and may have actually increased the number of non-fatal injuries."
Slowing down boats makes it more difficult for manatees to detect and locate approaching boats, while increasing the transect times or how long it takes for boats to actually pass through manatee habitats. When manatees are unable to reliably detect approaching boats, increasing time of exposure increases the risk of collisions.
"The increase in multiple propeller and boat scar patterns we are seeing on surviving animals is consistent with the implementation of slow speed zones in their habitats," said Edmund Gerstein. "Today, we have living manatees that have been hit dozens of times some with as much as 50 different scar patterns from boat encounters."
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Monday July 24 2017, @12:26AM (3 children)
And so often we find out years later that doing something actually aggravated the problem.
How long before we start to notice the underlying pattern?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @01:04AM (2 children)
Not just government. Most of healthcare is like this. If you have an only rudimentary understanding of something (eg the human body) trying to fix it is likely not going to work out just because there are so many more ways for things to break.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @08:12AM
And not just them, but private business Capitalism Entrepreeners are exactly like this. They pretend to be a "service" that will "solve" your problems, but they end up causing even more, and more deadly, problems! As Customer Service training taught a one place I worked, briefly, "Don't just handle the problem, OWN the problem!" And they took it one more step: "Don't just own the problem, BE the problem! And then offer to fix it for a small fee. Nice $whatever you have there. Would be shame if something were to happen to it!" Ah, libertarian Somalian Paradise privitization fantasies, they get me every time.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday July 25 2017, @12:08AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?