Why do earthquakes make it harder for whales to find food?

Earthquakes can make it harder for whales to find food by disrupting the marine environment and impacting the whales' sensitive hearing, which they rely on for communication, navigation, and locating prey.

When an earthquake occurs, it releases a tremendous amount of energy that generates seismic waves through the Earth's crust. Underwater, these seismic waves become sound waves due to the conversion of energy from shaking to acoustic form as it enters the water. These underwater tremors can be disorientating and even damaging to marine life, particularly to cetaceans like whales that have acute hearing and use echolocation to survive.

Echolocation is the process by which whales emit calls out to the environment and listen to the echoes of these calls that return from various objects near them. They use these echoes to locate and identify the objects, including their prey. An earthquake can produce intense noise that can interfere with this echolocation process.

In addition to directly impacting whales' hearing, earthquakes can also have broader ecological effects: - Seismic activity can cause landslides under the sea, which could bury or disrupt the habitats of the prey species that whales feed on. - Earthquakes can change the topography of the ocean floor, thereby impacting the routes of ocean currents that may affect the distribution and abundance of planktonic food sources for baleen whales. - The disorientation and stress caused by earthquakes, and changes in prey behavior or availability, may lead to less efficient foraging by whales.

These disruptions can lead to periods where whales have a much harder time finding food, which may affect their health and ability to reproduce.