New technology can keep whales safe from speeding ships

livemint.com:

On March 3rd a whale calf washed ashore in Georgia, on America’s east coast, bearing slash marks characteristic of a ship’s propeller. Less than a month later another whale, a recent mother, was found floating off the coast of Virginia. Her back was broken from the blunt-force trauma of a ship collision; her calf, missing and still meant to be nursing, is not expected to live.

Three deaths within weeks is not good news for the North Atlantic right whales, of which only about 360 remain. They are dying mainly because of human activity, and they are not alone. Ship collisions threaten whale populations worldwide, killing up to 20,000 individuals annually.

With global ocean traffic forecast to rise by at least 240% by 2050, the problem will balloon. But a new movement is using technology to fight back. On April 11th a Californian strike-prevention programme expanded operations across North American waters.

Other countries are following suit. Whale Safe launched in 2020, two years after the number of whales killed by collisions in California reached a record high of 14. Callie Leiphardt, the scientist leading the project at the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, says that for every killed whale found, ten more are thought to die unrecorded.

That so many were dying despite voluntary speed limits suggested more robust interventions were needed. The team reasoned that by alerting ships to whales, and publicising which shipping companies ignored the speed limit, they might increase compliance and bring down deaths. Their approach rests on listening for whales underwater using microphone-equipped buoys capable of separating low-frequency whale calls from the ocean’s background noise.