According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 23 dead whales have washed ashore since December of last year; 12 of them off the shores of New York and New Jersey. Most fatalities have been humpbacks and the main cause of these deaths may have been collisions with ships.
Various factors are believed to be behind this recent phenomenon of dead whales. On the upside, the whale population is simply growing ever since it was deemed illegal to hunt them after 1985.
Another possible cause is that due to warming oceans, whales and their preferred prey migrate closer and closer to the coasts.
At the same time, record-setting cargo shipments fueled by pandemic spending habits have made New Jersey and New York ports the busiest in the country. With more ships and more whales in the same place, there’s been an inevitable rise in the two striking each other.
But the trend of dead whales has been observed over the past several years, not just post-pandemic. Over the past six or seven years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has seen the humpback North Atlantic whale deaths surge on the East Coast. They’ve gone so far as to declare an unusual mortality event for both species. A UME is defined as a “significant die-off of any marine mammal population.”
This latest wave is concerning to scientists because of its geographical concentration and the rate at which it is happening. Along with this ship-driven surge, there have been questions about other technologies’ effect on whales. Wind farms that have become a fixture off the shores of New York and New Jersey have also been speculated to play a role for years, though there has been politicized debate about their impact. Instead, scientists like Erica Staaterman, a bioacoustician at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Center for Marine Acoustics, are more worried about oil and gas exploration.
“Those in oil and gas are called seismic air guns, and they’re specifically designed to penetrate kilometers into the seafloor. So they’re very high energy, very loud sources,” she said. She added that tools which prepare offshore sites are “high resolution geophysical sources, and they’re typically smaller in the amount of acoustic energy they put into the water column.”
The final variable has been that it is often difficult to administer a post-mortem examination. Investigators are not able to determine a cause of death for more than half of the whales. Most are too decomposed, while others may have died of infections that are impossible to differentiate from the bacteria that forms on dead tissue. This factor has definitely hampered studies that might shed more light on the unexplained phenomenon.
As more attention is given to these whales, protestors have made their frustration and desire for answers known, only adding to the increasing tension surrounding the issue.
