Can you hear me OK? http://9taxi.in.net/ 9taxi When NOAA released its report in 2006, Robert Brownell, a cetacean biologist at NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Pacific Grove, Calif., explained that the organization was not entirely sure why sonar causes whales to change their behavior. He hypothesized that the noise from the sonar "forms an acoustic barrier, and they want to escape."