<
https://reneweconomy.com.au/offshore-wind-turbines-create-all-you-can-eat-havens-where-some-fish-can-double-in-size/>
"Certain species of fish can be up to two times bigger when living in protected
offshore wind farm zones, a new study has found.
Not only do the rough surfaces of turbine monopiles and submarine cables
provide new habitats for sponges, corals, anemones and other sessile organisms,
but that extra food source allows other creatures to thrive as well.
“These benthic-dominated [ocean flora and fauna that live close to the seabed]
ecosystems are critical for nutrient cycling, diversifying food webs and even
storing carbon,” said Murdoch University emeritus professor Neil Loneragan, a
coauthor on the paper in
Global Ecology and Conservation.
“The results from the paper are very encouraging – they show wind turbines
create a different localised marine environment with many positive attributes.”
The paper, by researchers from Murdoch and Dalian Ocean universities, compared
data from the Zhuanghe offshore wind farm in China’s northern Yellow Sea with a
control area without turbines around 6km east across 2023 and 2024.
It was built between 2019 and 2021 and is the largest offshore wind project in
northeast China, with an installed capacity of 1.35 gigawatts (GW).
They fed Ecopath with Ecosim software models with biological and environmental
survey data collected from the Zhuanghe wind farm and a nearby control area
without any offshore wind activity.
What they found were more groups and more complexity in the oceanic food chain,
especially for macroinvertebrates and fish, as seabed creatures had new
surfaces to colonise, from footings to the gravel around monopile bases to
other subseas infrastructure to colonise.
Fat greenling fish were estimated to be twice as big in the offshore wind zone
as out of it; the Korean rockfish was more than three times bigger, as is the
predatory Asian rapa whelk."
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*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
