October 4, 2023 — For the past seven years, the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service has been monitoring a spike in whale strandings along the entire East Coast.
The agency has declared the ongoing situation an “unusual mortality event,” or UME, for humpback whales. More than 200 humpback strandings have been reported since 2016 along the eastern seaboard, from Maine to Florida.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Fisheries Department says it has conducted partial or full necropsy examinations on about half the whales, with 40 per cent of those examinations showing evidence of human interaction, such as entanglement or ship strikes.
But theories about offshore wind energy projects contributing to the deaths have risen alongside the strandings, despite the NOAA rejecting those claims.