Joel and Allen deep dive into WHALES along the US East Coast. Does sonar scans at offshore wind sites affect whale behavior? The East Coast has an uptick in ship traffic - does ship density push up whale incidents?







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153 Bonus



Allen Hall: Welcome to a bonus episode of the Uptime Podcast. I'm Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech. And I'm here with Wind Power Lab's Joel Saxum. And Joel and I have been looking at some of the whale incidents in the whale deaths that have been occurring on the northeast of the United States.



Allen Hall: And it's raised a lot of issues along, along the East Coast, particularly with state and local governments that are concerned about these deaths, and there's a lot of finger pointing going on right now, Joel, in, in regards to what is causing these well deaths and are offshore wind turbine operations.



Allen Hall: Particularly the sonar scans that are happening at the moment, harming the whales. And, and the whales they're, they're most interested in and are most concerned about are Right Whales because there's about 350, 400 right whales left on the planet and we wanna make sure we continue to that species. So when we see a right whale end up on the shoreline, particularly down in New Jersey lately, it raises a lot of concern.



Joel Saxum: So, I mean, Allen we, you and I dug into a lot of the data and what the data tells us is that the majority, I think 58% we saw within US water were deaths of the right whales were due to fishing gear entanglement. And then the other large percentage of them was from vessel strikes. And there's a small percentage of them that they're, that, that are kind of mysteries.



Joel Saxum: We don't, we don't know. Right. But the majority of them is from, from fishing and it would be commercial fishing of course. And vessel strike. So they've put in, in 2008. A government agency, I can't remember which one, put in a, a law and had certain areas that they blocked out basically during certain seasons, they know where they're doing ca where calving is, they know where the whales are traveling to their feeding ground.



Joel Saxum: So they put in and a lot of 'em around ports. These, these areas where they have these 10 knot speed limits for any vessel that's over 65 feet. And the idea is, is they, they found, they went through a bunch of studies and found that between 10 and 14 knots of speed is when the mortality rate of a collision increases.



Joel Saxum: So it went up once those 10 to 14 knot speeds and, and higher we're, we're breached. So they want to keep all those vessels under 10 knots. Smart move. Right. I think that's great if you're, Click on any pictures or websites and research. The same thing that Alan and I have been looking at for the last while do it after you've had a meal or something.



Joel Saxum: Cuz there's some just not pretty pictures of Right whales on the, on the internet that have been hit by vessels. It's a, it's pretty, it's a pretty sad site to see. So it's not, not something we want to see, but what we're, what we are seeing, and I say we as Alan and I looking through a lot of data here, so we looked at.



Joel Saxum: where we see all of the auctions happening for, for the wind off the East coast. We also looked@marinetraffic.com and some of the, the Marine,