At first glance, the stretch of coast near the Bennett Street beach access point in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, blends seamlessly with the rest of the coastline.
It’s nearly impossible to tell that less than a month ago, this sand cradled the lifeless, 19,000-pound carcass of a humpback whale.
Now, the soft tissue of the humpback lies below the sand. Its skeleton is housed in the neighboring town of Corolla, where students are analyzing remains for a school project, said Marina Piscitelli-Doshkov, stranding coordinator for the Marine Mammal Stranding Network.
Under the beach, the humpback will join a number of other whales buried along the shore. Since 2016, humpback whale mortalities have increased, along with a rise in the deaths of minke and North Atlantic right whales along the Atlantic coast.
N.C. coastal communities are actively debating the cause of the increase in whale mortalities, with concerns surrounding political agendas at the heart of the discussion.
Marine scientists have identified human interaction — whales coming into contact with ships — as the leading cause of these whale mortalities, causing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to attempt to slow vessels down.
Many fishermen have opposed stricter regulations, blaming many economic struggles on a mountain of NOAA rules.
Others call out the construction of offshore wind turbines as disrupting whales’ migratory paths and hearing, pushing them into waters where fishing and shipping boats often roam.
“Everybody’s got an opinion,” Dewey Hemilright, a commercial fisherman based in Wanchese and a member of the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council, said.
‘A Huge Shift’
Piscitelli-Doshkov has spent her career working on necropsies of beached mammals for the MMSN.
“I’ve been doing this for 20-plus years,” Piscitelli-Doshkov said. “There’s been a huge shift in the past few years with people — just in general.”
Five years ago, when the MMSN was called to investigate a whale washed ashore and start the process of determining a cause of death — performing a necropsy — no one would show up, she said.
Now, people flock to the scene.
In addition to the political climate surrounding wind energy, Piscitelli-Doshkov attributes the attention that recent whale beachings receive to social media and the spectacles “going kind of viral.”
The MMSN responded to Kitty Hawk Police Officers’ report of the juvenile female humpback on the morning of Dec. 27. After the MMSN finished the whale’s necropsy, the Kitty Hawk Public Works Department handled its burial.
“All we could tell on the necropsy was that it was a blunt force trauma, and that is usually done by a ship strike,” Piscitelli-Doshkov said.
Whether the whale was alive or dead when it was hit will be determined after blood and diagnostic analyses are run. NOAA must pay for all samples to be researched, so the MMSN is now “just waiting” for the agency to officially approve more tests, she said.
But the MMSN can’t always determine a whale’s cause of death through necropsy.
Because whales generate so much heat within their internal insulation system, once they die, “they start pretty much cooking from the inside,” said Craig Harms, director of the marine health program at North Carolina State University’s Center for Marine Sciences and Technology.
Harms, who often works with the MMSN, added that “once you do a post mortem exam, you might be going through a lot of mush.”
‘Barely holding on’
In April 2017, NOAA declared an Unusual Mortality Event (UME) for humpback whales. The agency defines a UME as a “marked increase in the magnitude or a marked change in the nature of morbidity, mortality, or strandings when compared with prior records”.
“Most of those increased mortalities are being caused by ship strikes,” Harms said.
According to NOAA, necropsies conducted on approximately half of beached humpbacks since 2016 showed that around 40% of their deaths involved a ship strike or entanglement.
NOAA has determined two other whale species — the minke and North Atlantic right — as also experiencing UMEs.
Currently, under NOAA’s North Atlantic Right Whale Reduction Rule — regulations intended to specifically protect right whales — vessels over 65 feet cannot go more than 10 knots in certain areas of the ocean called seasonal management areas.
“There’s only about 360 of these whales left,” Harms said. “And we could very well drive them to extinction within 10 to 20 years if we don’t do something more than what we’re doing.”
In 2022, NOAA proposed to apply the 10-knot speed rule to vessels over 35 feet. This suggestion was officially withdrawn Jan. 16 due to “ongoing requests from the public for further opportunity to review and engage with the Agency on the proposal.”
Hemilright said the majority of commercial fishing vessels operate under 10 knots, so recreational fishermen, such as charter boat operators, would suffer most under these speeding limitations.
The speed restrictions make running charters extremely difficult for recreational fishermen, whom Hemilright said have been “devastated” by the regulations.
“And these are individual, small businesses,” he added. “These ain’t corporations.”
Cane Faircloth, a former recreational fisherman and board member for the North Carolina For Hire Captains Association, who currently manages a few charter boats, said the reduction rule would mainly affect larger recreational boats.
But many recreational fishermen, he added, are worried that restrictions will continue to apply to smaller and smaller boats.
“If you start getting into that under 30-foot range, then that hits the majority of boats that are going out in the ocean fishing,” Faircloth said.
It’s not fair, he continued, for speed restrictions to be placed on boats that have never hit or come close to hitting a right whale. Slowing from an average speed of around 25 knots to 10 could double the travel time to fishing waters and hurt business, he said.
Faircloth, a 49-year-old fifth-generation fisherman, said that he has never heard of a recreational fishing boat hitting a whale.
“I think when those whales are hit, it’s more of your big freighters, big ships,” he said. “Because those big ships, they move as fast as us little boats do, and they take up such a big area — it’s a lot harder for a whale to get away from them than it would be to get away from one of us.”
Between 2022 and 2023, NOAA filed 53 complaints against vessel operators, totaling nearly $1 million in civil penalties. The agency uses satellite technology, portable radar units and active patrols to detect speeding and enforce restrictions.
While paying a violation can be detrimental to local fisheries, large shipping vessels incur the fees as “just the price of doing business,” Hemilright said.
For big companies, “What the hell’s a $20,000 fine?” he added.
Where Hemilright sees the largest economic loss for North Carolina’s fishermen under NOAA regulations is competition from imported seafood.
“If every other country had to fish by the same regulations that I have, it’d be a lot more fish in the ocean,” he said.
According to NOAA, the U.S. imports 70-85% of its seafood.
“We’re barely holding on as an industry, because there’s so many regulations,” Hemilright noted.
‘Doesn’t make any sense’
But fishing charters and shipping containers aren’t the only entities being blamed for increased whale deaths. Offshore wind turbine facilities have also faced criticism.
“These facilities are being placed in whales’ migratory paths and feeding and calving areas, and their construction and operations are excessively noisy, which is especially dangerous to whales who rely on sonar, pushing them into shipping and fishing lanes where they suffer deadly boat strikes and fishing entanglements,” Jon Sanders, a research editor for the John Locke Foundation, wrote in a Jan. 3 blog post.
Harms, though, said humpback, right or minke whales are among the species of whales that do not use sonar.
Read noted that marine scientists like he and Harms have been documenting whale deaths since before there were offshore wind activities.
“The science is really clear that there’s no evidence whatsoever that any of these whales are being killed by any activity associated with offshore wind turbines,” he said.
But Faircloth said he doubts some people performing necropsies “check for the right stuff.”
While he understands the Dec. 27 whale that washed ashore in Kitty Hawk faced a ship strike, he questions whether its eardrums or communication abilities were affected by the Kitty Hawk Wind offshore turbine being constructed 27 miles off the coast.
People have linked whale deaths to offshore wind, Read said, to advance a political agenda against the development of green energy sources.
On the opposite side of the political spectrum, Faircloth said people “are all in on green energy” and don’t want to hear about the harm facilities are doing to the environment.
Besides Kitty Hawk Wind, another offshore wind project has been proposed 22 miles from Bald Head Island — Carolina Long Bay. The project and location is still being assessed and construction has not started.
Hemilright, who works as a fishery representative to Kitty Hawk Wind, said people who are anti wind “would do anything that would stop a wind turbine from being built.”
The Kitty Hawk Wind project is in a dead zone, a “pass through” for fishermen, Faircloth said, but Carolina Long Bay would be encroaching on a bustling fishing area.
“So you’re going to build this wind farm on one of our best fishing grounds, most productive reefs, habitats that are millions of years old, and you’re going to build a wind farm on it, where there’s 13 endangered species — that doesn’t make any sense,” he added.
“If I thought there was a smoking gun, then it’d be easy,” he said.
