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Yet more benefits to renewable energy sources & ways for other animals to adapt to them.
In a discovery by researchers from Leiden University in the Netherlands, offshore wind turbines have become a haven for benthos — the community of marine organisms that live in, on or around the seafloor.
There are more soil animals per square meter living in the foundations of offshore wind farms than on the floor of the North Sea, a press release from Leiden University said.
“The turbine foundations provide hard substrate for settlement in areas where these habitats have never been present before. Except for islands, there are now structures spanning the entire range from sea floor to sea surface,” Jan Vanaverbeke, a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, told EcoWatch in an email. “A lot of organisms, normally living on hard substrates (rocks, bio- or geogenic reefs) have larvae with pelagic stadia, drifting in the water column and trying to find a suitable place to settle and grow into an adult. The turbines provide such substrate in areas where it has never been present before.”
In the area surrounding the wind farms, fishing is not allowed, meaning fish can flourish.
“Banning fisheries from offshore wind farms has positive effects as (1) wind farms provide a safe place for fish (where some species find a lot of food), and (2) the sea floor is not disturbed and therefore long-living animals have a chance to actually live long (they are not impacted/killed by the fishing gear that is passing),” Vanaverbeke told EcoWatch.