March 30, 2022 — Plans for 17 or more offshore wind turbine arrays off the U.S. East Coast mean more imminent peril for the endangered North Atlantic right whale – unless regulators and wind power developers implement sweeping new protection for the animals, according to one expert on the species.
Ship strikes and fishing gear entanglement already top the list of hazards for the right whale population, now estimated at less than 340 animals. Construction work and increasing vessel traffic around wind projects will add to the danger, says Mark Baumgartner, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute whose laboratory tracks and studies the whales.
“We’ve never found a right whale that died of old age,” said Baumgartner. “We find they die from industrial accidents.”
A presentation by Baumgartner is titled “The Fate of North Atlantic Right Whales in an Increasingly Industrialized Ocean.” In an online discussion hosted Monday by the Rutgers Cooperative Extension Service in New Jersey, Baumgartner gave a blunt assessment of the situation.
“Right now, it’s not good,” he said, “unless we change our industrial practices.”