Protecting whales from ship collisions

In the summer of 2022, I was walking on the beach in Half Moon Bay, California, when I saw something strange coming towards me on the waves. When it hit the shore and deflated, I knew it was a dead whale.

But it wasn’t just any whale. It was Fran.

“I knew about this whale, but I thought, oh my. It shocked me to the core, because at the time, Fran was the most famous whale in our entire database. “Because it was,” said Ted Cheeseman, creator of HappyWhale. Com. This database of whale sightings includes over 850 photos of Fran, a humpback whale that can be identified by the pattern on its tail.

“She had a great personality,” Cheeseman said. “She was fooling around around the whale-watching boat, and I heard on the radio, ‘Hey, Fran’s here!’” “Oh, yeah, let’s go hang out with Fran! ”

Fran had a baby named Aria, but she was now an orphan. “We didn’t know if the calf was going to survive,” Cheeseman said. “I didn’t think so. I didn’t think that was very likely.”

Fran was killed in a collision with one of the cruise ships and container ships that make more than 200 million voyages each year.

Sean Hastings, policy manager for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said ship strikes and entanglements in fishing gear are the No. 1 threat to whales, and the No. 2 threat.

No one knows exactly how many whales are killed in ship strikes each year, as most whales sink after a collision. However, blue, humpback and fin whales are on the endangered species list, and northern right whales are critically endangered, with only about 350 left on the planet.

“That’s why every whale matters and why we can help restore whale populations and help whales recover,” Hastings said.

The good news is that the shipping companies themselves say they care.

Bud Dar, director of policy at MSC, the world’s largest shipping company, said: “No one in our industry wants to see these amazing creatures harmed or killed by our actions. No,” he said.

He told us why the captain could not avoid the whale. The bow of even one of MSC’s small container ships is hundreds of feet from where the captain sits. Even if you spot a whale up ahead, there’s not much you can do about it.

“A ship is a very large object,” Darr said. “It’s moving very fast and it’s noisy, which means that even if you have a collision with a whale, you may never know there was a collision. Unfortunately, when the whale comes, the vessel’s bulbous I once stayed on the bow.” “

One obvious solution is to change transport routes. “We realized off the coast of Sri Lanka that we could reduce the risk (of strikes) by more than 95 percent by simply moving our operations about 15 miles offshore,” Dahl said. Ta.

However, the approach channels to most ports do not allow room for rerouting. Therefore, the next best option is to reduce the boat’s speed from about 18 miles per hour to 12 miles per hour. Hastings said: “By slowing down your ship, you give the whale a better chance of getting out of the way. And if you do hit a whale, you have a better chance of surviving. This is because there is a low-speed zone around you. It is very similar to establishing a It’s school. ”

Ports also have emissions rewards. “Slower ships pollute less air and emit less greenhouse gases out of their chimneys,” Hastings said.

However, rerouting and slowing down both require critical data for the captain. “Is there a whale ahead?” That’s where technology comes in.

At Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, marine ecologist Mark Baumgartner’s lab operates a fleet of autonomous vehicles called Slocum Gliders that “fly” beneath the waves while listening to whale songs.

“Every two hours, the vehicle surfaces and uses its antenna to send all the information to a computer in the lab,” Baumgartner said.

He also deploys a series of microphone buoys. The purpose of all these machines is to listen to whale songs.

The captain receives information about the whale’s location from buoys and gliders, allowing him to slow it down. But on the West Coast, slowing down is voluntary.

At WhaleSafe.com, you can view vessel routes, whale locations, and compliance letter grades for shipping companies. About 30% of them still ignore the warning and proceed at full speed.

Mr. Bud Dahl of MSC explains the reason as follows. “There’s some schedule impact, and there’s probably some associated cost impact, and it takes a lot of advanced knowledge and planning to mitigate that and deal with it appropriately. But most of these The solution is manageable.”

Compliance is also voluntary across much of the East Coast, so northern right whales continue to be harvested by ships. NOAA is proposing regulations that would require speed reductions in more areas.

Mark Baumgartner is cautiously optimistic. “If I didn’t have any hope, I’d go home and curl up and be done with it,” he says. “So that’s what’s helping me move forward.”

Well, this might cheer him up. Remember Fran’s baby whale, Aria? Whale tracker Ted Cheeseman receives a call from a naturalist. “He said, ‘Hey Ted, I think I just saw Aria, can you confirm?'” And then he sent me a photo, and I was like, “Yeah! Aria is alive!” I thought.

“We hope to bring calves here in a few years,” Cheeseman said. “And I hope so, if we continue to protect them from ship strikes, protect them from entanglements, and continue to protect healthy oceans.”

For more information:

Story produced by Amy Wall. Editor: David Bhagat.

See also:

More from CBS News