With hundreds of towering offshore wind turbines planned to be built in the waters south of Martha’s Vineyard, a team of local scientists is working to find out if the construction noise will hurt ocean life.

As regulators consider projects up and down the east coast, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have been simulating the booming sound of pile driving turbine monopiles to see if it has an effect on a variety of species. So far, results have been mixed.

While there’s been research into how turbine construction impacts the endangered right whale, the ocean’s small ground critters have largely been left to fend for themselves, said Aran Mooney, an associate scientist at WHOI.

“This is a knowledge gap, and it could really impact the fisheries,” he said.

The research team has been replicating construction and observing its effects on lobsters, sea scallops, flounder, squid and black sea bass. Mr. Mooney’s work was contracted by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the federal agency that oversees offshore wind energy.

In the past few years, the WHOI scientists have determined the impact the noise has on squid by playing an audio recording of pile driving as they were enclosed in a tank.

“The sound profiles are pretty much the same as what we see in offshore wind, actual construction.” Mr. Mooney said.

Once the sound played, the squid inked, jetted and changed into vibrant colors. Mr. Mooney said that while squid often have a flair for the dramatic, they seemed to habituate to the noise.

Sea scallops, a prized fishery in southeastern Massachusetts, had almost an opposite reaction, Mr. Mooney said. Every time the bivalves heard the pile driving sound, the scallops clammed up, closing their shells tight.

After some time, they would try to open their shells back up, but would immediately close again when the sound played.

“They’re breathing faster and harder, and it actually exhausts their main muscle, and then they are much more susceptible to predation,” Mr. Mooney said.

In recent months Mr. Mooney’s team have been focused on studying lobsters. In the fall, WHOI ran a daily experiment with 60 lobsters from Rhode Island. A construction company drove a one-foot diameter steel piling into the Woods Hole harbor seabed. Two of the lobsters at a time were placed in enclosures 10 and 60 meters away to see how they would react.

Mr. Mooney said the experiment represents a scaled down version of lobster habitat, recreating what the species would experience when the massive 30-foot-wide pile drivers used by offshore wind developers are employed. Ten meters represents what a lobster resting at 300 meters away from the pile driving would experience, and 60 meters represents a lobster one kilometer away from the offshore wind construction.

To gauge the lobsters’ reaction, the researchers equipped the crustaceans with health monitors, as well as tiny backpacks with sensors.

“We created these little Fitbits for them that measure their heart rate,” Mr. Mooney said.

The lobster data is still being analyzed and the team won’t have results for several months.

The team is also studying the effects on flounder, putting monitors on their gills and tracking each time the fish takes a breath. The scientists so far have noticed the flounder will stop swimming when they hear the pile driving noise.

While the scientists don’t know for certain, they hypothesize that the pile driving noise is stressing the fish and making them hold their breath, Mr. Mooney said.

Offshore wind developers are required to mitigate their effects on the ocean’s species, though this type of construction has never been done before in the northeast. For example, farms are restricted to when it can pile drive in order to protect right whales. They are also required to have observers looking and listening for protected species during construction.

Vineyard Wind, which is dealing with the fallout of its broken turbine blade, previously touted special technology used to keep the ocean quiet despite the loud hammering.

During the installation of its dozens of monopiles, Vineyard Wind has used what’s known as a bubble curtain, which creates a sound barrier of bubbles, as well as a noise-reducing hammer.

But even with these mitigation efforts, the WHOI scientists worry that sea creatures could be harmed, making the study crucial work.

“The bubble curtains are designed for basically the higher kind of frequency parts of the sound that mostly marine mammals detect,” Mr. Mooney said. “For the animals that detect low frequency sound – the fishes and the squid and scallops and lobster – the bubble curtains probably won’t be a very protective measure.”