‘Quieter ocean’ from COVID-19 could be a boon to endangered orcas, say researchers A paper published last month in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America said there has been about a 30 per cent decrease commercial shipping traffic into the Port of Vancouver from China due to COVID-19 in just the first four months of the year.Dewey said it’s not just commercial traffic that’s gone down — there’s also been a pause in whale watching boats, cruise ships, recreational vessels and tankers.
That’s led to a noise reduction ofabout 75 per cent, he said.“What we are seeing in the Salish Sea is levels of shipping noise that haven’t been present for three or four decades,” he said.“So we would have to go back to the 1980s before we would.