 If I wanna thank everyone for taking the time this afternoon to participate in this webinar. This is a continuation of the fact finding or gathering inputs by the National Academies Committee on Evaluation of Hydrodynamic Modeling and Implications for Offshore Wind Development for the Nantucka-Scholes area. And I am Eileen Hoffman. I have the honor of being the chair of this committee. And if I could have the next slide, please. So just to give you, for those who are not familiar with the committee who may be logging in here, this is a statement of task for the committee. And basically what we're looking at is the effects of offshore wind turbine structures on local to regional scales of hydrodynamic processes and the scale of that effect relative to the change of natural variability. You can read the statement of task. There is this on the committee website. If you're interested in that, as well as other information about the committee. Today we're pleased to be here to hear Dr. Andy Pershing talk to us. But before we begin that, I think I'd like to ask the committee members to please briefly introduce themselves and just say where you are and then we'll go ahead with the webinar. And that way Dr. Pershing will know who he's talking to. All right, so I'm gonna go in the order that's given here. As I said, my name is Eileen Hoffman and I'm at Old Dominion University. I'm an oceanographer with interest in physical biological interactions. So Jeff Carpenter, if you're here, yes please, if you would introduce yourself please. Hi everyone, my name is Jeff Carpenter. I'm a physical oceanographer in Germany at the Helmholtz Center, Herion, close to Hamburg. And my research interests are in small scale turbulent flows as well as the offshore wind farm problem. Okay, thank you. Jim, if you're here, perhaps he's not joined yet. Okay, Josh Kohut is unable to join today's webinar because of another obligation. Richard, if you would please introduce yourself. So I'm Richard Merrick. I'm retired from the fisheries. My last gig with them though as a chief scientist. I'm here in part because of my background working with the right whales. Okay, thank you. Erin, please. Hi, I'm Erin Meyer-Gutbrod. I'm an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina. And some of my work includes looking at oceanographic drivers to right whale distribution and demography. Okay, thank you. Doug. Yeah, thanks, Eileen. Welcome, Andy. I'm Doug Noecek. I'm at Duke University and I work on right whale bioacoustics and behavioral ecology and including for gene ecology. Hey, thank you. Doug. That was me. Yeah, I'm sorry, Doug. I can't read this afternoon, it would appear. Okay, Kaus, please. Hi, I'm Kaus Frago-Kumar. I'm an integral consulting in Santa Cruz, California. My research interests are in underwater acoustics and physical oceanography. And I'm here because of some work we've been doing on the West Coast, looking at the effects of offshore wind forms on coastal upwelling. Okay, thank you. Nick, please. He may not have been able to join yet. Okay, I think Jim Chen just has joined. So Jim, if you're here, would you please introduce yourself? Yeah, hi, I'm Jim Chen. I have some difficulty lying. So yeah, I'm a professor at Nossi Eastern University in the Department of Civil Environmental Engineering. I'm doing a coastal modeling in general. Hey, thank you. So that's the committee who just introduced themselves. And as I said, the webinar we're holding today is a continuation of the committee's work in gathering information that will be incorporated into the report that we're writing. And the report should be hopefully finished later this year in early fall. But I think in the interest of time, we'll go ahead and get started with the webinar. And we're very pleased today to have Dr. Andy Pershing as a presenter for the webinar. Dr. Pershing is the Vice President for Science for Climate Central, which is a group of scientists who form an independent climate communications group that provides information about changing climate and its effect on people and society. Prior to joining Climate Central, Dr. Pershing was the Chief Scientific Officer for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute where he also led the Climate Change Ecology Lab. And he was also a member of the Marine Science Faculty at the University of Maryland. Dr. Pershing has published extensively on the Northwest Atlantic Marine Ecosystems in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean. And his presentation today on zooplankton community changes in the Northwest Atlantic will provide us hopefully with an overview of how this important component of the marine ecosystem is changing and changing in response to the climate change. So Dr. Pershing, please go ahead. All right, thank you so much for giving me a chance to talk to you. It's so great to see many of you. I spent a lot of time thinking about copepods and right whales throughout my career, moved to Climate Central about two and a half years ago to really focus on the climate problem. And it's great to get a chance to put my head back into whales today or at least into some copepod stuff. So I'm gonna present some results that Adam Kemberling from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and I have currently have in review at the ICES Journal. It very much follows on other work that we've done looking at zooplankton community dynamics in the Northwest Atlantic. So I'm gonna start by talking about zooplankton community changes in the Gulf of Maine and specifically trying to ask the question, why does Calanus decline sometimes and why is it low right now? And this is gonna, as I said, build very strongly on this new paper that we're hoping to get out here later in the year. And then I'm gonna try to pull together just a few, some of my synthesis of how to think about the connection between warming and whales. And I expect that a lot of this won't be new to you especially given the composition of the folks on your panel. So I'm gonna start with how we sample plankton in the Northwest Atlantic. There are lots of ways to sample plankton. The continuous plankton recorder which is the instrument here is not the best one but it is the best one for doing it for a long period of time and over space, right? The great thing about the continuous plankton recorder was that it was invented in the 1930s by Sir Alistair Hardy using the very latest of clockwork technology available in the 1930s. Think about propellers and gears. I mean, they're really beautiful. They're sort of like a Swiss watch that you can tow behind a ship. But the cool thing about the CPR is that it gives you a spatial record of plankton abundance. They can be towed from commercial ships traveling at their normal speed, which is pretty remarkable. So you can get a record along the route of a ship as it's transiting across the Atlantic. And we have the opportunity from the continuous plankton recorder to get very long-term records. The Marine Biological Association in the UK which took over from the Sir Alistair Hardy Foundation for Ocean Sciences, the global continuous plankton recorder surveys has records in some places that go back to the late 40s and early 50s. So it really is a remarkable dataset that we can use to understand impact of climate change on ecosystems. In the Gulf of Maine and the Northwest Atlantic, the continuous plankton surveys started in 1961. It was operated by the National Marine Fisheries Service. And it ran more or less continuously. There was a gap for a couple of years in the 1970s or more or less continuously starting in 1961. In 2014, the kind of sequestration budget challenges that I'm sure Richard can tell you all about started to happen. And the continuous plankton recorder survey fell out of the NEMS budget. The Marine Biological Association in the UK resumed funding the route. They were able to pay to have the route continue, but they weren't able to fund the sample processing. So they were collecting the data, the samples were just being stored in a warehouse in the UK. And also at that time, the route shifted from the blue domain here in the South to the pink domain in the North because the ship that they were using shifted its home port from Boston to Portland, Maine. In 2017, Marine Biological Association decided they could no longer support the route. And so they paused the route at the end of 2017. And so I'm gonna be looking at the data up through that period. Thankfully, in part through the need to understand the impact of changes in the plankton community on right whales, the survey has resumed with funding from the National Marine Fisheries Service and with the survey managed and the samples being processed in the UK. by the Marine Biological Association. So when we take all of the data, we can throw it through various ways of trying to understand what's going on with a particular species. We remove the annual cycle, we look at anomalies off of the annual cycle, and that's this abundance index that I've been working with throughout most of my career. And so we can do this for in here, seven major zooplankton taxa. These are the zooplankton taxa in this region that are consistently sampled and are represented in many of the plankton samples that get collected. So we're gonna talk about a couple of them, obviously Calanus fin margicus, which is the main prey item for the North Atlantic right whale. And I'm gonna contrast Calanus with Centropages and you'll see why in a minute. But one of the things I want you to know is we look at these two species as how similar many of these time series are. Centropages, the aethonids, Matridia, the Pseudocalanus, Paracalanus, they all have this high 90s, low 2000s kind of time regime shift like time series. And that's an important thing that will come out of the analysis. So we have a lot of data here. The challenge is how do we make sense of it? And so we've been working with principal components analysis for a long time. It's a way of summarizing a multivariate data set and trying to reduce the dimensionality. And so this is what I'm showing here is the loadings, the principal component loadings for those taxa that I showed in the previous graph. So the orange bars indicate the strength of the loading for under the first mode, the leading mode explains 53% of the variance in the data. The blue is the loading on the second mode which explains about 29% of the variance. You'll notice that the orange bars go up for Centropagies and the blue bars go down for Calanus. Okay, so this is our two modes. We have one mode, mode one, that really is the average abundance of the non-calanus copepods. We'll call, I usually call it the small copepod mode, although keeping in mind, Centropagies is not actually that small. We then have mode two, which is very much Calanus, but with some of the other larger subarctic species also factoring in as well, but it's really our Calanus mode. One thing I want to point out is that these associations that are represented here have been very stable through time. We first looked at them in a paper that I wrote in 2005. We found almost exactly the same mode. One of the things that we do in our recent paper that Adam and I have worked on is looked at just different 20 year periods and we see the same sets of associations persisting, even though the Gulf of Maine is much different now than it was when the survey started in 1961. So it's kind of, I think, a notable result. The other thing I want to point out is while I'm specifically talking about the Gulf of Maine, I know that this committee is really interested in what's going on in the mid-Atlantic. In a paper that we wrote in 2010, we not only found that there were similar zooplankton associations throughout the Northwest Atlantic from basically from New York up to Newfoundland, but we also see that the Mid-Atlantic Bight, the plankton community there, is very strongly correlated with the Gulf of Maine. There is plankton data from the Mid-Atlantic from a route running out of New York City and we have not had a chance to look at that yet. Okay, so again, Kalanus, we're gonna keep contrasting Kalanus, which has its very, it's the main member of the second mode. And then we have Centropagies, which is an important component of the leading mode and is just kind of a good indicator species for that mode. If we look at the time series now that are represented by those two modes, you can see that the orange mode has this very strong regime shift like pattern, low in the 90s, high in the, sorry, low in the 80s, high in the 90s, low in the 2000s, and then it's gone back up in over the last five to seven years, whereas our Kalanus mode is in the blue. And so if we just think of this from the point of view of Kalanus, right? Because we're thinking about the whales. The 1980s, we had high Kalanus in the 1980s and we had high Kalanus in the early 2000s and we have low Kalanus in the 1990s and low Kalanus recently in the 2010s. And just to kind of drive home the whale point, during the 1980s, the right-well population as far as we know was growing, the right-well population was also growing in the early 2000s. When Kalanus was low in the 1990s, the population was declining, calves were not being produced faster than mortality. And similarly, we're now dealing with a stressed population that's dealing with low food and low calf production. Okay, so what drives the plankton changes? This is an important question that we've tried to answer at different points throughout, over the decades to where we've been studying this. This is a time series of sea surface temperature that the Gulf of Maine Research Institute produced. So you can see how rapidly this region is warmed, especially the warming after 2010. We really almost jumped into a different temperature regime right around 2010. And that's driving a lot of how we think about this system. But remember, we have our low Kalanus periods, right? We have low Kalanus was low in the 1990s, which was when it was cold, as well as the 2000s when it's hot. So we have this kind of a little bit of attention. So temperature is not telling us the whole story. It's not a simple temperature story, although we think the temperature is really what's driving a lot of the dynamics now. What we think is going on here, and I'll try to make this case a little bit more explicitly, is that stratification is really important. And temperature in recent, so both of these conditions, hot or fresh, are associated with higher stratification, right? You have dense water, sorry, low density water sitting on top of high density water. That's the situation that we get every year in the summer. And so one of the ways of interpreting these plankton community changes that we're really just taking the summer, the summer plankton regime and expanding it throughout the season. And we can see that sometimes in the seasonal cycles. Okay, so there's a seasonality to this. So in the paper that Adam and I put together, one of the things we did was we tried to look in detail over the last, say, 17 years, since 2001, and to take advantage of the high-frequency, daily hydrographic data that we have from the Niracou's buoy array. And so we took all of the buoy data, temperature and salinity at all of the depths, at all of the buoys in the Gulf of Maine, and we throw it into, again, another principal component. We get that the leading mode is basically just the average conditions and it's temperature and salinity averaged together. So what a high value in this buoy principal component, one means is warm and salty, which has been the dominant conditions in the Gulf of Maine over the last few years. Okay, so what I'm showing here in this figure on the left are each quarter, so Q1. And I'm associating Q1 with, in this case, Q1 in Centropagy's abundance, Q2 in Centropagy's Q3, Q4. So you can see that when Q1 is warm and salty, Centropagy's is high. When Q1 is warm and salty, we also tend to see it high at Q3, right? So we get these somewhat persistent changes. For Kalanus, we don't see as many significant relationships, so we do see a significant negative relationship between the buoy conditions in Q3 in the summer and Kalanus in Q3, and that we think is really critical. So we compare it with buoy data 2001 through 2017, mode one in the buoy is hot and salty. Okay, so we tend to see that when Centropagy's increases, the Kalanus decreases, and we can see that here. So when Kalanus is high, Centropagy's is low. So if Kalanus is high in Q3, Centropagy's is low. If Kalanus is low in Q3, Centropagy's is high, and it persists. And this is one of the messages is that we think that Kalanus is generally leading the dynamics, and Centropagy's is following and giving this persistence to the kind of giving us this kind of regime shift-like response. So you can see this here as well. So this is, if Centropagy's leads Centropagy's, obviously it's very correlated, but Centropagy's tends to persist. So if it's high in Q1, it tends to be high throughout the rest of the year. So you can think of this as an event is really starting in Q3. For example, if it's warm in Q3, Kalanus declines, and that leads to an increase opposite sign relationship with Centropagy's throughout the year that persists. So the hypothesis, the mechanism that we're dealing with here is that we have a plankton community with an exposure to warming, or we can look at individual heat waves. That, and that manifests itself most strongly in the summer, leading to an increase in the smaller copepods, leading to a decrease in Kalanus, or I'm xing out a Kalanus. And then we get, in some ways, almost an amplification of that process throughout the year. As it persists on into the summer, and so we end up with more of the small copepods the next summer and fewer Kalanus. And that gets reinforced because in many cases, we also have persistence in the heating as well, right? We're dealing with a trend, it's not like we're hot and then go back to cold. So here's a whole page of references. I'm gonna leave this with the committee because what I wanna do is actually try to use these references and walk through just a few bits of evidence that we have about how some of these things are connected. So in my synthesis, we're gonna start with Kalanus decreasing. We're gonna think about a decrease in Kalanus leading to an increase in centropages. Okay, we have evidence from that in terms of the community dynamics that have been persistent over a long period of time from some of our earlier papers like my paper in 2005, paper in 2010, and then the recent work that I just presented with Adam Kemberling are calling that PK23. So each of these little ovals represents a study. We of course know that the temperature is arising and we know the temperature that the warming has led to a decrease in Kalanus. So NEC record did important work on that in 2019 using plankton data from the MARMAP dataset, Aaron Meyer-Gudbrod with Chuck Green and others reinforced that using some of the continuous plankton recorded data that I presented, using some different physical drivers showing that as the warming has happened, the Kalanus has declined and then we come in as well with our more recent work kind of reinforcing that. We also know that when Kalanus declined that the number of right well calves declined. This is a very consistent relationship throughout the time series. Chuck Green and I first noticed that in 2004, lots of folks have looked at that throughout the years including Aaron and her work in 2021 as well as some of her earlier papers. And then we also know that right well distributions are sensitive to the Kalanus as well. And when Kalanus changes on an inter-annual basis, we see right wells shifting where they feed and when they feed in the Gulf of Maine. So this was work that Dan Pendleton did in back in 2009 and then Nick Recker reinforced this with his analysis going between the Gulf of Maine and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. And so finally just kind of one more way of thinking about the future, warming is going to continue. There's no way that that is not gonna happen. May get a cold year here and there but the cold years are gonna be less frequent and they're gonna be less cold. That means that good Kalanus years are going to be increasingly scarce in the Gulf of Maine and especially further to the South. And that means that our right wells are going to be on the move. And so this is just a diagram depicting this and some of the other community changes in the Gulf of Maine from the Gulf of Maine 2050 review paper that we published a few years ago. And I'm gonna stop there and I would love to have a discussion. Okay, thank you. That was very, very interesting and some very interesting ideas and thoughts there. So I'll open this up for questions if anyone has a question. So let's see. Any questions? Yes, please go ahead. Yeah, Jeff, go ahead please. Yeah, thanks a lot for the talk. As a physical oceanographer, I kind of missed a little bit the connection to the stratification. You said it's not just a temperature story. So is it really increases and decreases in total stratification that are making changes or how was that connected then? Yeah, that's it. So this is something that we've been trying to figure out for a long time because the first thing that really got us thinking about stratification was in the 1990s. So we had in the 1990s, this pulse of very fresh water that came into the Gulf of Maine, actually kind of came down than the whole shelf system from the Northwest Atlantic and led to these persistent plankton community changes. And so that led to a number of papers that Chuck Green and I and others wrote talking about hypothesizing that stratification was what connected, was what was driving the plankton dynamics. So the idea was that the fresh, the reduced salinity allowed the seasonal stratification to increase or to start earlier in the year. It changed some of the phytoplankton bloom dynamics and that affected the zooplankton community. So it was sort of the hypothesis we were working on then. I'd say now it's just really interesting to see that we get almost exactly the same community structure emerge in this new climate, even though the water is a couple of degrees Celsius on average warmer than it used to be. And we think that the stratification dynamics are having a similar kind of effect. So the fact that it's warmer, we're moving into the summer more stratified period earlier in the year. And so that keeps Kalinus numbers down. Yeah, yeah, please Doug, go ahead. I'm actually gonna go on to something slightly different, Eileen, if Erin wants to follow up on any of that. Okay, Erin, did you have a follow up for that comment? Sure, a little bit. I was wondering, Andy, have you or are you thinking about looking at these community dynamics and comparing them with an actual index of stratification, like perhaps a mixed layer depth or something that's trying to combine both the freshness and the warmth of the water? Yeah, so Erin, this is something that we've tried to do. I've tried to find good stratification time series periodically throughout my career. And I have to say I've never found one that seemed consistent. So we've always tended to do this via proxies, right? With SST or with this buoy time series that does have the temperature and salinity mixed in or with some of the stuff that you and Chuck have done with the slope water indices. So it's always been a little bit by proxy. And so I would say that the stratification is still, it's still in a bit of a hypothesis mode where we kind of hypothesized that that's the mechanism. The best, I think the most kind of mechanistic, the closest we've gotten to a really good mechanistic description of how this might work was some of the modeling work that Rubauji did around some of the like the late 90s freshwater events. And so he looked at, he was running a model looking at the freshwater events and how that affected the phenology of the phytoplankton blooms. Right, Doug, did you wanna? Yeah, thanks again, Andy, for coming in and sharing this with us. Not that it necessarily helps right whales, but I'm kind of curious as to if you have thoughts about the overall biomass numbers regardless of the, well, I mean, taking into account the community structure but then the, if it impacts the overall biomass. Yeah, so biomass in biomass, the biomass of plankton in the Gulf of Maine is to first order how much callinous biomass you have. Callinous is just so much bigger and so much more productive that you really don't see that this compensation. And the right whales, I think are a great indicator of that. We saw with the work that the Dan Pendleton and Nick Rekard and I were doing in the right around 2010, we were looking at how whales were kind of the timing of when whales shift from moving from Cape Cod Bay to the Great South Channel and how many would come to the Great South Channel. And a really callinous was just a really good indicator of that. These smaller copepods, there's evidence that the whales eat them. It's probably important, but it's like the salad, it's the salad course before the big meal, right? That's, I think the way, certainly the way Stormy Mayo has always characterized it. Any other questions? Yeah, Erin, go ahead. And then I'd like to ask one when you're done. So go ahead, yeah. Yeah, Andy, this one is unfair. It's the kind of question that everybody hates, but I'm going to try and ask you to extrapolate a bit beyond the bounds of your study because you're using the CPR data and you're finding this push and pull between the late stage callinous and margekiss and, you know, the centripogees, the smaller bugs. And here the point of this committee is to assess the hydrodynamic impacts of turbines in the Nantucket-Scholes region. And so in that region, you know, I have the sense that centripogees and those smaller bugs already have kind of a stronger foothold in the zooplankton community relative to where your CPR is running. So given that challenge, do you have any ability to speculate? You know, how that sort of difference in community farther south could sort of map on to the things that you've found with these seasonal dynamics? Yeah, so I think the way, I guess the mental model I would have would be, I think the one that we've tried, you know, that we developed over the years with, you know, with Cape Cod Bay, that, you know, it's a coastal environment. So you're going to get, you know, a little bit more action with some of the, a little more of the coastal species. So centripogees, Pseudocalinus, right? Acarcia probably is going to be important there at some points during the year. And, you know, with Calinus coming in, perhaps in pulses, right? Coming out of the Gulf, out of the Great South Channel, you know, and vecting down the shelf in pulses. So it's interesting to me that, like, when Dan Pendleton, some of his modeling work actually, you know, was looking at some of the habitat, the habitat suitability for right whales based on the Gulf, based on the Cape Cod Bay and was finding, you know, a lot of similarity between Cape Cod Bay and this Nantucket-Scholes region. So in some ways kind of predicted, you know, predicted that this might be an area that whales would find, you know, appealing in the way that Cape Cod Bay is. But as far as it, like, driving their, driving the whales' population dynamics, I don't think that's likely to be the case. I think that, you know, Calinus is really what determines how many, you know, how many calves you produce each year. And, you know, the areas south of the Cape are just not going to have the abundance of Calinus. And they're definitely not going to have the abundance of Calinus, you know, to move into, you know, a quarter of a degree or half a degree more of warming. Yeah, you know, I love thinking about Calinus and right whale calving. But I guess the task of the committee will have to look beyond that because if there's food enough to draw right whales into the area, which in recent years there has been, part of the charge is, you know, how will the placement of turbines impact prey availability, which could then impact right whale use of that area? You know, could it be drawing them in or could it just, you know, the placement of turbines disperse them? So we are thinking sort of beyond just the demographic impacts and more into the distribution. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that was somewhat similar to the question I was going to ask was that could you speculate where right whale habitat is going to move over the, say, you know, in response to the climate changes that are going on now? Yeah, so, you know, Dan Pendleton, I actually, you know, wrote, put together a bit of a speculative piece that was in oceanography I think last summer that was just really kind of trying to think through the challenges that the whales have as they're trying to adapt to this new world, right? I mean, you just think about the whales. They've had, you know, probably a thousand years to figure out how to, like, make a living in the Gulf of Maine. Now we've warmed it up and we've made it much, you know, we've made it different. And so now the whales are having to go and figure out how to, like, how to string it together in, you know, in a new ocean. And probably about the point they figure that out, it's going to change again, right? That's what climate change is that we're going to just keep pressing on this species. And so we actually did a little bit of, you know, some kind of loose mapping work based on some of the sea surface temperature projections sort of suggested that, you know, as the, as things warm up, you're going to see, you know, that the habitat, you know, core habitat shift to places like the Gulf of St. Lawrence, core habitat shift to places like Newfoundland. But I think this core habitat model, it can be a little bit deceptive because the whales are, I mean, they're explorers. They're having to figure out how to make a living in the ocean. And so I think they're spending, you know, having to spend a lot more time, you know, moving around and trying to figure out where, you know, where the, you know, where good feeding is. Okay, great. Thank you. Richard, please. Yeah. So to continue on the stratification topic, it appears over the last decade plus that, that area in the Antiqua Shoals area, not the shoals itself, but the area where the wind farm projects are, has actually become more stratified, at least in time, such as extending significantly farther into the fall and probably into the spring. So one of the questions that emerges to us as we're looking at the effect these turbines could have, if it does change the stratification, if perhaps they get less stratified, can you speculate on what that might do for right-will and accountants? Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's, if you were to make it less stratified, you know, you might be able to get, you know, cool things down in the, you know, in the wake of the turbines, perhaps it might, you know, give you, you know, changes in the productivity, perhaps, but I just, I don't see it making a big enough, having a big enough spatial footprint to affect calendars on like a, you know, kind of a population level, mostly just because the water is just going to be passing through there, you know, fairly rapidly. So you might, if you imagine like a water mass going through, might get mixed up a little bit, it might sort of tip the balance a little more favorably towards Calanus, you know, for a few days, and then it, then it sort of moves through. Yeah, and I think that just answered the question in the chat here about reduced stratification in the region of wind turbines and the potential effects of that on the Calanus population. So, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah. Yeah, yes, thank you. Okay. Are there any other comments or questions while we have Dr. Pershing's undivided attention here? So, yes, please Nick, go ahead. And then Jeff, yeah. Hi, Andy. Thanks for the talk. That was great. Just thinking about like the big shifts that happen, happened and could continue to happen. And if you're thinking about like you put in, say a bunch of turbines go in and then say Calanus is being measured and it change, you know, goes through another like sort of big change. How, how could one distinguish that change? But you know, attribute it to the turbines versus one of the other type of big sort of surprising shifts that we have seen in the past. Yeah, a great, great question. It's, I think I would really think of it in terms of the spatial scale that the, you know, the things that we're talking about with the, you know, with the continuous plankton recorder data or with the mar mapped, you know, time series, really are looking at Calanus as like a, you know, as kind of a, I've always thought of it as like a kind of a population level, you know, the total abundance of Calanus in a region. And we see that changing, you know, more or less, you know, together, right? With the, with the spatial, with the footprint of the physics. So I would say like if you, you know, if you were to have sampling and you showed that, you know, somehow, you know, Calanus, you know, you know, really went down at the wind, you know, the wind sites, I would say that if you, if you don't see a similar decline, you know, at this larger spatial scale, then, you know, then you didn't need to be able to say that that was, you know, that that was more likely due to the, to the installations. But if you, you know, if you really are just seeing at your local site, something that's just part of the, the kind of the broader footprint, I think that you would say that it's more, more related to the, to the larger scale dynamics. And I think, you know, for Calanus, there, there's some really great papers. One of my favorite papers, Oxnes and Blendtime, I forget the year. I love it so much. You think I could remember the year. But they just did, you know, really kind of a really interesting, just almost like a back at the envelope scaling argument of like how, you know, basically what's the, what's the spatial area that drives Calanus dynamics or by which you would see, you would see different, you would see changes in Calanus and that's surprisingly large given how, because they live, you know, for relatively long time relative to other copepods, you end up getting, you know, it's, it's kind of on the scale of, you know, at least one of the deep basins, if not the whole Gulf of Maine. Right. Okay. Thank you. And Jeff. Yeah. Um, one thing that we heard about in earlier talks was the, the distribution vertically in the water column of, of Calanus and that they form these sort of concentrated layers. Um, and that can also be correlated with the stratification. Um, and I guess one effect of the wind farms could be to sort of disperse these, um, vertically in the water column. Um, can you maybe comment on, on those kinds of effects? Yeah. So in, you know, in the work that we were doing, um, you know, kind of the late 2000s, we were, we were really kind of grappling with this, this difference in scales, right? Between the kind of the, you know, the Gulf of Maine scale, Cape Cod Bay or, you know, great South channel scale, and then this, you know, hyper local scale that the, that the whales are actually feeding on. And, you know, the, the, the, the kind of the, at least like the heuristic model that we, that we had was that that you have these, you know, the large scale physics are essentially setting the, you know, the total abundance in the region, determining whether you're, whether you have a good Kalinus year or not. And then you have, and then you run them through the various local dynamics that determine whether you get patches or not. Because we, at least for the things, places that we were studying, there doesn't seem to be a big, you know, big difference year to year in the tides in the, in, you know, in Cape Cod Bay that would determine the patch structure or in the, you know, in the outflow of the, you know, the Gulf of Saint, of the Great South channel. It really was like, you know, are you, are you putting a lot of Kalinus into the blender? Are you not putting a lot of Kalinus into the blender? So that's kind of how we would, how we wouldn't think about it. I would assume that the, you know, that the wind turbine impacts would be, you know, stable and consistent through time. And there really is kind of how, how much, what your input is into the, into the system. Yeah. You think it's more of a, like a total biomass effect? You think the total biomass effect is much bigger than say the vertical distribution? I, well, it's, I mean, it, it's a, they're, they go, they go hand in hand. So if you have a place where, where, where the physics create these kind of, you know, stable or, you know, high intensity aggregations that the whales really queue in on, and then you feed it with a lot, you know, with a high background concentration of Kalinus, that's going to give you your, you know, really good feeding. That's what the whales, the whales need both of these things to be true. Okay. Thanks. Yeah, thank you. There is a question from Pat Halpern in the chat here and asking, are the decadal low and high periods related to NaO cycles in any way? Yeah. I mean, that was, that was, you know, the NaO was a big part of what, how we were thinking about the kind of the, the natural climate variability side of this in, you know, in the work we were doing in the 90s and 2000s. You know, NaO is, is certainly out there. It's, it's a less, I've found it to be a less reliable predictor than it used to be, you know, could just be a longer time series and we're kind of, you know, getting to the point of, of understanding it. But, you know, the big changes that we've seen lately are more related to, to these kind of larger oceanographic changes in the northwest Atlantic, like, you know, the slowdown in the meridional overturning circulation, you know, that's probably a big part of the warming that we've seen in this region. And that's certainly, you know, something that, you know, has come out of the work that Nick and Aaron have done. Hey, thank you. Yes, I believe that Panja Malek, do you have a question your hand is up? Do you want to put your question in the chat perhaps? Yeah. Hi, we can hear you now. Yes, we can hear you now. Go ahead. Okay. Well, are there any other questions while we're waiting? I guess that, okay. Okay, I guess not. Okay. All right. So, um, yeah. Yes, Tom Kilpatrick, please. Yeah, I had a question if I'm allowed to. This is Tom Kilpatrick from BOMB. So just along the same lines of the NAO question. So the first part you showed the SST warming way above trend. And you just mentioned, you mentioned that might be due to mox load. I was wondering then, is that thought to be kind of like decadal variability that could reverse or is it more thought to be that like climate change is just having like this rapid and more intense impact in this area like polar amplification kind of analog in the ocean? Yeah. So that's a great question. That is something that we tried to address in a couple of the studies that came out of the Gulf of Maine 2050 effort back in 2019. So that we, you know, it's, there are, there are projection models that have the Gulf of Maine warming at the rate that we've seen at this much, you know, much exaggerated or above, you know, above average or certainly above average for the global ocean rate. There are some of the models for this region where that don't have quite that kind of local climate sensitivity. And so those models would tend to suggest that this is a, that this is more of a, you know, cycle on top of warming. So, you know, I'd say we don't quite know that answer yet. My sense is that this, you know, the warming has really persisted. And if anything is, you know, continued to increase right 2022 was, you know, is even warmer than, you know, the big heat wave of years that we had in 2012 and 2016. So, you know, it does look more and more. I'd say every year that it stays warm. You know, you're, you're adding evidence to the, to the, to the suggestion that this is more of a trend and not a cycle. But I'd say, you know, even if it is, even if it is cyclical, you know, if there's like a, you know, switch in the AMO sort of event, you know, you're not going to cool down to conditions that you had in the 1990s. You know, best you're going to cool down to the, you know, the conditions we had maybe in 2010. Okay. Um, would you like to, um, dipangent molecule? Do you want to try again? Yes. Am I audible now? Yes, you are. Yes. Thank you. My question is that. Can I, can we think of. Since the. I mean, setting up of the turbines and the. Is it audible? Yeah. Yeah. It's okay. I think that's not, um, yeah. Yeah. Yes. My question is that we. What we can understand that. The turbine setting up this turbines and the climate change. Are impacting the habitat of the wells. we can understand it from the excellent modeling. Now, can we create some guiding path for the whales so that they can find their new habitat more easily by using our models? So, if I understand your question correctly, is there, you're asking basically, is there anything that we can do that could kind of help the whales find a more suitable habitat or just more rapid, more keep up with the changes in the ocean? And I'd say there really isn't anything we can do in that respect. And so it really is just about reducing mortality to zero. It's reducing the amount of rope in the water, it's reducing the speed of the vessels, making sure that we're trying to get mortality as close to zero as possible. Okay, all right, thank you. Are there any other questions to follow up here? Okay, well, if not, then Andy, thank you so much. Your comments will be very useful as we go forward with writing this report and we're very likely to be coming back to you with some questions and, but anyway, but thank you very much for taking the time and for providing such a useful presentation for the committee. So I'll ask one more time if there are any other comments and if not, then I think we'll end our webinar here. Right, that's a lot, it was fun. Thank you, it was really informative. I learned a lot, so thank you. I loved getting to think about whales today. I think it's taking most of my time thinking about heat in Texas. Yeah, that's not a good place to be right now. So, and I can say that as someone who used to live there. So anyway, all right, thank you and thank everybody for your participation and we'll go forward with our report, so thank you. All right, bye. Thank you everyone. Bye-bye. Thanks, Armin.