HONOLULU (Reuters) - A coalition of environmental groups Monday asked a federal court to stop the U.S. Navy from launching tests designed to see how humpback whales react to piercing sounds blasted through the water. The proposed Low Frequency Active (LFA) sonar system would use huge transmitters towed behind ships to pump deafening sound into waters just a few miles from the new Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. The groups, including Greenpeace and the Animal Welfare Institute, asked for a temporary restraining order to stop the tests off the Kona coast of Hawaii's Big Island on Feb. 25.
"The Navy has tried to minimize public awareness and input," said attorney Paul Achitoff of the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund.
"The public has a right to judge for itself if we need to put our endangered marine life at risk in this way." The groups said the test of LFA, designed as a long-range sonar system to detect "quiet" submarines by flooding the oceans with soundwaves, could torture and possibly injure the targeted whales in their favorite breeding habitat.
"The test is specifically designed to see how the endangered whales -- including those breeding and nursing -- react to bursts of underwater noise a thousand times louder than a 747 jet engine," the groups' news release said. The Navy plan reportedly intends to use sounds of up to 215 decibels to see how loud a sound must be before it causes a "behavioral change" in the whales.
Scientists familiar with the project said it was designed to help the Navy avoid disturbing marine life in future by obtaining data on what exactly the whales can and cannot tolerate. Similar tests have already been completed in recent months on blue whales and migrating gray whales near the California coast, they added.
"This will allow them more accurately to see how animals perceive sound," said Adam Frankel of the Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate (ATOC) project run by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, an unaffiliated research venture that also uses sound waves in Hawaiian waters. "There is no reason to think that physical injury would occur," he said.
Mark Berman of the Earth Island Institute, one of the groups demanding a halt to the tests, said much more research should be done before filling the whales' habitat with what could be intolerable noise.
"We don't think they've done enough studies in advance to protect the whales," Berman said.
"We find the whole thing outrageous because of the fact that these tests are being done for the military when it is not really necessary," Berman said. "The Cold War is over, nobody else even has the kind of submarines these systems are designed to look for."
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