• hihi24522@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    “Well you asked the right guy. I’m a whale biologist. Though personally I hate whales. Especially Mushu.”

    “Then why’d you become a whale biologist?”

    “I don’t know you well enough to get into that.”

  • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    Fun fact: every species on earth has been evolving for the same amount of time. Assuming that life wasn’t spontaneously generated multiple times on planet Earth, which seems relatively unlikely.

    For some reason, I feel oddly defensive about the whale being insulted. Suck on that you stupid marine biologist, you should understand evolution more better.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Well, you can find whales on tinder, but sometimes they use a picture of a friend…

  • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    How well sound propagates through water is highly dependent on the water temperature variations over depth. There can be conditions in which sounds can be trapped between two different horizontal “layers” and travel far greater distances than 80km.

    • flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      Wow, that’s cool. Completely makes sense but not something I’d thought about…

      Would the temperature differences need to be very large for this effect to occur?

      • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        As sound travels through a water layer where the speed through which it travels varies with depth, the sound will tend to refract towards where it is the slowest.

        A layer where temperature decreases as depth increases will refract sound downwards. A layer that has the inverse temperature properties will do the opposite. A layer that is isothermal (where the temperature remains constant as depth changes), will still tend to refract sound upwards because the increase in pressure also increases velocity, although not as strongly as temperature does, which is why temperature differences can easily overcome this effect where the water is not isothermal.

        If you have a layer that refracts sound downwards on top of a layer that refracts sound upwards, you just created a sound channel, which acts as a wave guide in which sound will remain trapped and travel far longer distances horizontally before dissipating.

        Ultimately you can’t really put a number on the required temperature differences because there are many other factors to take into account like how steeply the speed of sound changes, how tall the layer(s) are, what is the frequency of the sound, or how much of it you want to remain “trapped” in the sound channel.

      • A_A@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        “The SOFAR channel (short for sound fixing and ranging channel) … is a horizontal layer of water in the ocean at which depth the speed of sound is at its minimum” …
        “The SOFAR channel acts as a waveguide for sound, and low frequency sound waves within the channel may travel thousands of miles before dissipating.” … https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOFAR_channel

  • dohpaz42@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    We’re all forgetting one important factor: quality over quantity. First of all, the whale doesn’t just sit in one place to broadcast their 80km calls. We can’t really say that about a marine biologist; who more than likely is out to sea and away from anyone else using Tinder.

    I’d bet those whales are getting more action than that marine biologist, despite having a “shorter” distance on their mating calls.

    Suck on that, you stupid marine biologist and your decade of education and training.