Whale Safe uses real-time data collection on whale activity to prevent crashes with nearby ships. Photo courtesy of Flickr.
By Lily Benn ’24
Staff Writer
On Aug. 29, 2022, the San Francisco Bay saw its fifth-known incident of a whale being fatally struck by a ship, according to The Guardian. This celebrity humpback whale was named Fran by whale-watcher Ferd Bergholz through the Oceanic Society, the Monterey Herald reported.
According to The Guardian, Fran had been seen 277 documented times since her birth in 2005. Fran has now become one of over 100 documented whales killed between 1988 and 2012, according to The Guardian. The article emphasizes how this may only be a small proportion of the real number, as most carcasses sink to the bottom of the ocean. The documented number reflects beached whales determined to have been killed by blunt force trauma in areas with lots of large ship traffic, such as San Francisco Bay.
This is especially a problem for endangered whale species. Endangered species such as humpback whales and right whales spend most of their lives near the surface, in danger of being struck by large, fast-moving commercial ships. The Guardian cites a 2019 study by Vanessa Pirotta and others which referred to these whales as “ocean roadkill.” According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, ship impact trauma on whales is one of the leading causes of death for the animals, as many international shipping and ferry lines overlap with the breeding and migration areas of endangered and non-endangered whale species.
In 2020, billionaire Marc Benioff developed Whale Safe, a technology he hoped would help alleviate this issue and save whales from being killed by the ships which share the ocean with them, according to an article from The Guardian.
The official Whale Safe website detailled how the AI technology works as a series of ocean buoys with attached acoustic monitoring technology that work to identify primarily blue, humpback and fin whale vocalizations. According to The Guardian, this is meant to allow the ships to slow down and avoid whales in their trajectory. It then combines the vocalization data with surface data of whale tracking and sighting to create an overall account of whale activity in the area for managers of ships and maritime shipping corporations, according to the Whale Safe website methodology.
According to The Guardian, as of September 2022 this technology is in use around San Francisco and Santa Barbara, one of the busiest shipping channels around the west coast of the United States. According to Whale Safe’s 2021 data, 58 percent of captains receiving this information cooperated and slowed down to a safer speed that was recommended by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Coast Guard and the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce whale-ship impacts.
John Calambokidis, a senior research biologist and one of the founders of the Cascadia Research Collective, spoke to The Guardian about the new technology. Cascadia Research Collective is a non-profit organization which focuses on marine bird and mammal biology, and ecology of marine environments among other issues, according to their website.
Calambokidis told The Guardian that he supports the Whale Safe project, as he believes it brings attention to the conservation of whales. However, he explained that he believes it is not a solution to the issue of whale death, as there are many pieces of data missing from this technology that are necessary to locate and thus protect the whales. He explained that the measure of how many calls there are in a given area is not representative of how many whales there are, as some species of whale make more noise than others. Therefore, Calambokidis explains, that the data given to ships may mislead captains, as there may be more or less whales than calculated.
The Guardian also spoke with Cotton Rockwood, a senior marine ecologist from Point Blue Conservation Science, a non-profit organization specializing in reducing impacts of environmental threats and developing “nature-based solutions” to help wildlife and people, according to their website.
In his interview with The Guardian, Rockwood explained that the tracking data does not necessarily impact captains’ decisions when navigating their ships. Captains may disregard suggestions of heightened whale activity if they do not see whales at the water’s surface and are less likely to slow down in these situations.
The Guardian concludes that both biologists agree that Whale Safe technology is beneficial in spreading the word on the problem of ship-induced whale deaths. In the article, Calambokidis also suggests the addition of institutional changes to protect whales, such as speed restrictions for ships and the changing of shipping lanes to places where whales are less likely to live and migrate.