The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, it is said. Wise words. Such is the case with Dolphin Safe Tuna, according to analysis at Southern Fried Science.

When it was determined many years ago that too many dolphins were dying at the hands of fisherman trying to snare tuna, an ecological push towards “dolphin safe tuna’ became the norm. You now find the logo for dolphin safe tuna on just about every can.

But there is a dark side:

If you work out the math on this (and you don’t have to, because the environmental justice foundation did) , you find that 1 dolphin saved costs 382 mahi-mahi, 188 wahoo, 82 yellowtail and other large fish, 27 sharks, and almost 1,200 small fish.

By trying to help dolphins, groups like Greenpeace caused one of the worst marine ecological disasters of all time. Few other fisheries are as bad for groups like sharks and sea turtles as the purse seine fishery, and none are as large in scale.

Here we get into the ethical debate.

Is it worth saving dolphins, who were not and are not endangered, at the expense of sea turtles, sharks, and many other fish species who are endangered?

To make this debate more interesting, I am taking the options of “just stop fishing for tuna” and “come up with another way” off the table- it’s simply not going to happen in reality, anyway.

More at Southern Fried Science

Echolocation was thought to be the domain of three creatures: bats, dolphins and Marvel’s Daredevil. Long suspected and now proven, we can add humans to the short list.

Research appears in the journal Acta Acustica that explains the process, via Discovery:

By recording the sounds and analyzing the shape of their sound waves, the team determined that the front click, or “palatal click,” was the most suited for echolocation. It is a simple sound, so the brain can interpret the echo easily, Martinez noted, but it also contains many frequencies. “The more frequencies involved in the echo, the more information about the object,” he said.

Kish agrees that many of the best echolocators use palatal clicks, but he noted that there is a role for both types. The rear-of-the-mouth click can be used to make very loud “power clicks,” he said, which are helpful for locating a building from a distance, even if the resolution of the information created by the sound is not as sharp as with the clearer palatal click.

Natural clicks are optimal for echolocation, Martinez added. According to research in progress, “if you don’t use natural clicks, your echolocation performance will be orders of magnitude worse.”