Photo credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
by Abigail Harrison, Editor, Quiet Communities
The proliferation of oil and gas drilling in the Gulf Of Mexico will threaten an endangered whale species, an environmental group argued in the United States Court of Appeals. The legal dispute is over the number of the leases the Department of the Interior will permit within its 2024–2029 National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program. The American Petroleum Institute challenged the final plan in court last February, requesting Interior include the maximum number of sales.
In January of this year, the American Society of Mammalogists weighed in — as just one of several environmental groups — stating that the area comprising the lease sales contain critically-endangered Rice whale habitat. And, due to ongoing lease activity in the Gulf, whales are already at risk of oil spills, vessel strikes, habitat and food disturbance and noise pollution.
The Rice whale is a species of baleen whale, which rely on hearing for “critical life functions” like navigation, communication, finding a mate and locating food. Excessive noise can produce “acoustic masking” which occurs when communications like whale calls can’t be understood due to acoustic interference.
The level of offshore oil and gas activity that API is seeking would disrupt the whale’s critical life functions, the group stated. That noise could include the sounds from seismic surveys, extraction, pipeline trenching, and even decommissioning activities which include explosions.
Though oil and gas leasing poses a threat to many species of whale, the Rice whale may be especially at risk. Rice whales are believed to live only in the Gulf of Mexico, exclusively in waters 100-400 meters deep along the Gulf shelf break. They do not embark on large-scale migrations and do not have distinct feeding or breeding grounds.
“Rice’s whale already faces a high risk of extinction due to its small, precarious population and several traits and existing stressors that render it uniquely vulnerable to the myriad industrial threats that it faces in the Gulf,” the group stated in the brief.
The American Society of Mammalogists is also arguing that the program failed to incorporate Rice’s whale in its environmental sensitivity analysis, calling the omission a “failure by the agency to uphold its responsibilities” that would exacerbate this species’ high risk of extinction. The group is asking the court to compel further analysis of the leasing program from the Department of the Interior.
