Conservation & Environment Archives - Page 59 of 442

Ninth whale death renews calls in New Jersey to halt offshore wind projects

February 15, 2023 — A whale washed ashore in Manasquan, New Jersey, on Monday – the ninth whale found dead since early December on the New York-New Jersey shores — further stoking the debate about what’s causing the frequent mortalities along the Atlantic Coast.

“I’m currently standing on the beach a few hundred feet from the Manasquan Inlet watching yet another dead whale wash into the surf,” Point Pleasant Beach Mayor Paul Kanitra posted on Facebook on Monday. “Governor, when do these stop becoming coincidences? How many more will it take?”

What’s behind the whale mortalities has not been clearly established, but theories abound. Some local activists and officials blame offshore wind development in the region, claiming construction of the sites causes harm to marine animals. But federal officials have pushed back, saying that’s not what the evidence shows.

Read the full article at CBS News

Third dead whale found miles from offshore wind farm in less than a week

February 15, 2023 — The third dead whale was discovered in less than a week off the southeastern coast of Virginia, miles from Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW), one of two operational wind farms in federal waters.

Over the weekend, a critically endangered North Atlantic right whale was discovered washed ashore near Chic’s Beach which is located in Virginia Beach, Virginia, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed to Fox News Digital on Monday. According to local news outlets, there was no immediate cause of death and the whale didn’t appear to have any entanglement marks.

The discovery of the beached right whale came just two days after a humpback whale was found dead along the shoreline in Cape Charles, Virginia, and five days after a dead humpback whale was found off the coast of First Landing State Park in Virginia Beach.

“There have been 3 large whale strandings in VA over the past week, two humpbacks and more recently a North Atlantic right whale,” NOAA spokesperson Allison Ferreira told Fox News Digital in an email. “We are investigating all of these incidents in collaboration with our stranding network partners.”

Read the full article at Fox News

Conservation group calls out wind energy projects for causing whale deaths

February 15, 2023 — Meghan Lapp of the Center for Sustainable Fisheries discusses an alarming uptick in whale deaths allegedly caused by offshore wind energy projects.

Watch the full video at Fox News

Whales Are Dying Along the East Coast. And a Fight Is Surfacing Over Who’s to Blame

February 14, 2023 — In mid-January, threatening social media messages started showing up on the accounts of a small New Jersey organization devoted to rescuing ocean mammals that wash up on the beach. Some said “we’re watching you.” Others accused staff of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center (MMSC) being “whale murderers.” Some people wrote that they were going to show up at the group’s Brigantine, N.J., headquarters and “make” members of the wildlife organization “come to [their] side.” “You don’t know what they’re gonna do,” says Michele Pagel, 49, the group’s assistant director. “Are they gonna march in here and put a gun to somebody’s head?”

Staff members contacted local police, and they started locking the doors to the group’s office. In late January, someone left the door unlocked, and a man burst into the office and approached the secretary. “He just starts [yelling], ‘I want to know, I demand to know,’” says Shelia Dean, 75, the group’s director. “He was very frightening.”

Along with picking up sick baby seals and dolphins, the MMSC helps to carry out examinations on the bodies of dead whales when they wash up on the shores of New York and New Jersey in order to collect scientific data, and hopefully help determine a cause of death. And in recent months, whales have been washing up on these shores with alarming frequency. Eight large whales, including sperm whales and humpbacks, have washed up in the area since December. Those deaths have become a focal point in the clean energy culture war, with conservative media commentators blaming them on preliminary site-mapping work for offshore wind developments. But evidence to support those claims hasn’t turned up. That’s brought down the ire of many people opposed to offshore wind on small animal welfare organizations like MMSC for supposedly hiding the truth of what killed those whales.

The work to actually examine those carcasses is grueling and tedious. It involves sourcing backhoes or other construction equipment to maneuver the school bus-sized animals, taking measurements, and then, when possible, undertaking difficult necropsies. A trailer parked in front of the MMSC’s offices houses the necessary equipment: smocks and boots, along with large knives and hooks for pulling off layers of cetacean skin and blubber to examine the animal and take tissue samples. It’s a messy, smelly business. In humpback whales, gasses from the whale’s putrefying innards often begin to swell the sack under the whale’s mouth. If it bursts, it can splatter anyone standing nearby with whale guts. If a whale had broken bones from being hit by a ship, for instance, the necropsy can help examiners tell if the ship strike occurred before or after the whale died. MMSC and other groups that collaborate on the necropsies then forward that information to the federal government, which provides some of their funding.

Read the full article at Yahoo News

Wind energy gets scrutiny following whale deaths

February 10, 2023 — Politicians, citizens and some environmentalists are calling for a slow-down or complete halt of wind energy activity off the East Coast as officials examine the cause of a rash of marine animal deaths, but neither action nor an answer appears to be imminent.

In January, the debate landed on the shores of Worcester County with the body of a humpback whale, which immediately led to speculation regarding the cause of its death.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is examining samples taken from the whale, but representative Allison Ferreira said that it will take “weeks to months” to receive the necropsy report.

“Given that necropsy reports provide a comprehensive account of the stranding event, ranging from a description of external observations and internal examination findings to the diagnostic results of samples taken, they can take several weeks to months to complete and finalize,” Ferreira said in an email.

A few days later, Ferreira added that preliminary findings from the necropsy indicate vessel strike as the cause of death.

“But we do not know (definitively) if it was struck before or after death,” she said. “Results from samples taken from the whale may help inform this, but we may never know.”

Read the full article at Ocean City Today

Alaska’s Bering Sea crab crisis is a sign of big changes in the future, scientists warn

February 9, 2023 — The first-ever cancellation of Alaska’s Bering Sea snow crab harvest was unprecedented and a shock to the state’s fishing industry and the communities dependent on it.

Unfortunately for that industry and those communities, those conditions are likely to be common in the future, according to several scientists who made presentations at the Alaska Marine Science Symposium held in late January.

The conditions that triggered the crash were likely warmer than any extreme possible during the preindustrial period but now can be expected in about one of every seven years, said Mike Litzow, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric scientist based in Kodiak. By the 2040s, those conditions can be expected to occur one out of every three years, he said.

Blame “borealization” for the disaster befalling snow crab, which is an Arctic species, Litzow said. That term refers to an ecosystem becoming boreal, with groups of organisms – called “taxa” by scientists – that have been south of the Arctic until recently.

“If we think about an Arctic animal at the southern edge of its range that’s exposed to really rapid warming, that leads us sort of inevitably to the concept of borealization,” said Litzow, director of NOAA Fisheries Kodiak laboratory and shellfish assessment program. “As you warm Arctic ecosystems, those systems become prone to a state change, where Arctic taxa such as snow crab become replaced by subarctic taxa that are better able to tolerate ice-free and warm conditions.”

Snow crab are dependent on the winter sea ice and the cold conditions created even after the seasonal melt, he said. While they are widely dispersed through the Bering Sea, the sweet spot for the commercial harvest – the place where the crab are big enough to be commercially valuable – is in the southeastern Bering Sea.

Read the full article at Arctic Today

Gulf of Mexico has warmed at twice rate of global oceans

February 7, 2023 –A new study says sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico have warmed about twice as much as global ocean waters since 1970.

Those findings indicate the Gulf of Mexico may be one more U.S. region where higher sea surface temperatures are outpacing global averages. Another is the Gulf of Maine, where the rate has been nearly triple of the world’s other oceans since the early 1980s.

The latest research comes from a joint effort between scientists at the National Centers for Environmental Information and the Northern Gulf Institute (NGI), a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Cooperative Institute. It quantifies the warming trend in the Gulf of Mexico’s ocean heat content over the past 50 years.

The study, published in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate, shows that waters closest to the surface in the Gulf of Mexico have increased at a rate approximately twice that of the global ocean in the decades between 1970 and 2020.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Revolution Wind Turbines’ Effects on Life in the Sea and on the Seafloor Remain Unclear

February 7, 2023 — Distant cousins of the machines that dotted the Dutch countryside to pump the ocean back into its bed, sentimentalized in art for 500 years, that have been slimmed down and redesigned in the 21^st century to fight global warming, will be hammered into the seafloor in glacial rock laid down 2.8 million years ago during the Pleistocene epoch.

Standing at a weird intersection of natural forces, human intervention, and climate disaster, windmills are now hip, and controversial.

But can wind turbines — what used to be windmills — off the coast of Rhode Island live up to their renewable energy promise? And what effects will they have on life in the sea?

Hundreds of experts from the U.S. Department of the Interior down to local fishermen and town planners are puzzling over these questions, especially now, during the permitting and approval process of the Revolution Wind project, in which developers Ørsted and Eversource hope to install up to 100 wind turbines on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) about 18 miles southeast of Point Judith. Cables to transmit power to the grid would make landfall in North Kingstown, and the project is expected to be online by 2025. The Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the project was published last fall.

Among the experts looking at the question of known and unknown impacts of an offshore wind facility on the OCS are marine biologists intimately familiar with the seafloor where the turbines would be. Sending cameras and other sophisticated monitoring machines 80 to 160 feet below the surface, these scientists examine the vast sand flats, some covered with sand dollars and northern star coral; the complex regions of cobbles and boulders; the lives of tiny, burrowing invertebrates; and the spawning habits of important commercial species such as cod and long-finned squid. They puzzle over the effects a wind project would have on the migration patterns of whales and other marine mammals.

Read the full article at ecoRI News

An unusually high number of whales are washing up on U.S. beaches

February 6, 2023 — Researchers are trying to figure out a mystery: Why are so many humpback whales, right whales, and other large mammals dying along the U.S. East Coast? One possible explanation is a shift in food habits. And while theories are circulating that blame the growing offshore wind industry, scientists say there’s no proof to support that idea.

Since Dec. 1, at least 18 reports have come in about large whales being washed ashore along the Atlantic Coast, according to the Marine Mammal Stranding Network. The losses are hitting populations that were already under watch, due to ongoing rises in unexpected deaths.

“Unfortunately, it’s been a period of several years where we have had elevated strandings of large whales, but we are still concerned about this pulse” in deaths that’s now been going on for weeks, as Sarah Wilkin, the coordinator for the Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program, said on a recent call with journalists.

Read the full article NPR

Green groups targeting blue-collar lobstermen are largely funded by dark money

February 6, 2023 — Environmental groups that have led litigation targeting the lobster fishing industry have been heavily funded by various liberal dark money groups that don’t disclose their individual donors, a Fox News Digital review of tax filings found.

The organizations — the Center For Biological Diversity, Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) and Defenders Of Wildlife — first filed a joint federal lawsuit against the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) in 2018, arguing a rule issued by the agency years earlier failed to properly protect the endangered North Atlantic right whales from lobster fishing equipment. In April 2020, a federal judge ruled in favor of the groups, ordering the NMFS to issue tighter restrictions.

“Right whales have been getting tangled up and killed in lobster gear for far too long,” Kristen Monsell, the oceans program litigation director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said at the time. “This decision sends a clear signal that federal officials must protect these desperately endangered animals from more painful and deadly entanglements before it’s too late.”

Read the full article at Fox News