Tagged Seals Revel Hangouts Near Wind Farms … Bad News for Salmon!
Seals tagged with GPS reporters have revealed that at least some of them really, really like to hang around wind farms and pipelines. A study published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on July 21, 2014. “I was shocked when I first saw the stunning grid pattern of a seal track around Sheringham Shoal,” an offshore wind farm in the United Kingdom, says Deborah Russell of the University of St Andrews. “You could see that the individual appeared to travel in straight lines between turbines, as if he was checking them out for potential prey and then stopping to forage at certain ones.”
Fortunately this study was done off of Scotland where salmon grow in farms, but one wonders … given that salmon end up in cans and migrate to their ends, do the wind farms look like canneries?