By Paul Homewood
h/t HotScot
Are increasing whale beachings due to wind farms?
"It’s too big a risk to assume that these sensitive, magnificent and ancient creatures will adapt to the clumsy experiments of humankind."
As deaf whales are washed ashore in Taiwan, with hearing loss being the ‘primary reason’ for their demise, I ask the question: are stranded British whales and dolphins casualties of the offshore wind industry in this country?
Practically every day brings new reports of stranded whales and dolphins around the British coast, the numbers are on the rise and nobody seems to know why.
Ever expanding wind farms are beginning to dominate our coastal seas.
Is there a link?
I’ve suggested in previous articles that it might be wise, indeed essential, to halt the further proliferation of offshore wind farms until we have safely established whether or not giant fields of humming wind turbines are causing havoc to sound-sensitive marine mammals – but the industry seems to be oblivious to the signs. Something is definitely awry.
“According to research by the CSIP (Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme), whale beachings in the UK rose by 15% in the period 2011 to 2017, a total of 4,896 whales, dolphins and porpoises died. The actual number of deaths is likely to be much higher as not all carcasses are washed ashore.”
With research showing that beached whales were stranded after becoming deaf, it’s surely time to stop the madness and reassess the wind industry.
Damaged hearing – the ‘primary reason’ for the beaching of whales
In April last year, a headline in Taiwan’s Taipei Times read "Beached whales’ hearing badly damaged". Taiwan’s Ocean Conservation Administration (OCA), discovered that scans on beached Pygmy Killer Whales showed abnormal shadows in their middle ears, concluding that it was a loss of hearing that caused them to become stranded. Indeed a beached Pilot whale that survived was placed under observation and was found to be completely deaf; according to observers the whale appeared to be "anxious and unable to swim normally." It was duly noted that "this was the primary reason for its stranding."
The definite cause of the whales’ hearing loss is not known, conservation specialists have suggested that it might have been caused by ‘some disease’. But it has nevertheless led to renewed concerns about the widespread construction of offshore wind farms in Taiwan, and there have been warnings that critically endangered Humpback Dolphins could be wiped out entirely by human activity, including wind farm development, off the coast of the island nation. The Taiwan conservation organisation MFCU said in statement that "the large-scale off-shore wind power plants along the western coast may also threaten the dolphins’ survival due to low-frequency noise by wind turbines".
Full post here.
There may be other possible causes for this apparent rise in whale deafness and beachings. And it may just be an artifact of increased observations.
But I cannot help thinking if that, it was not wind turbines which were responsible, Greenpeace and the rest would have been all over this like a rash by now.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
January 20, 2020 at 04:45PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 