This week, the federal government decided to exclude waters off Florida from the next five-year plan for oil and gas drilling leases along the Outer Continental Shelf.

But offshore oil exploration is still on the table. Nine companies have applied for permits to use seismic air guns to survey for oil and gas from Cape Canaveral to Delaware. For days, weeks or months at a time, the surveys shoot pulses of compressed air from the ocean's surface in 10 to 15 second intervals. The sound reflects back information to create 3-D images of the ocean floor.

The impact of the surveys on whales and other marine life has been hotly debated. In August, William Yancey Brown, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's chief environmental officer, asserted in an agency newsletter that there's no documented scientific evidence of noise from air guns used in seismic surveys "adversely affecting marine animal populations or coastal communities" or commercial fishing.

But Grant Gilmore, a senior scientist with Estuarine, Coastal and Ocean Science, Inc. in Vero Beach, says the impacts to fish could be significant but haven't been sufficiently studied. He's studied Florida and Caribbean fish and the sounds they make for four decades, working at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Fort Pierce and Dynamac Corp. at the Kennedy Space Center.

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