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To Save Whales From Ship Strikes, Listen Closely
On a gray morning this past March, a half-dozen scientists scanned the sea while bobbing offshore of Chile’s Atacama Desert. When an enormous whale surfaced, their small boat zoomed over to meet it. Marine biologist Susannah Buchan strapped on a waist harness, leaned out over the bow and waited. As the fin whale porpoised again, she placed a forearm-sized neon orange tracker near its dorsal fin. The team would retrieve the tracker the next morning after its suction cups released to download the whale’s movements and listen to its vocalizations.
Fin whales are the world’s second-largest whale species. You might not have heard much about them since “they aren’t the biggest, the jumpiest or the most vocal of whales,” Buchan says. Instead, their claim to fame is more depressing: Fins are the whales most frequently killed by large ships.
Tagging fin whales with Susannah Buchan (left). Credit: Brianna Randall
Buchan has been tagging fin and blue whales — both of which are listed as endangered species — for the past five years in Chile, in hopes of collecting data that will help ships avoid hitting them. What she’s learning from listening to their underwater sounds might save the lives of some of the largest animals to ever live on our planet.
Thousands of whales are killed or injured each year from collisions with ships. With a four-fold increase in commercial maritime traffic since 1992, more whales are becoming roadkill in ocean shipping lanes. Roughly 90 percent of the world’s goods are transported over the ocean, mainly by giant cargo vessels. Even more terrifying for cetaceans, a study in Nature predicts that by 2050, the world’s oceans will have up to 12 times as many ships as they do today.
We know ship strikes are one of the main causes of death for marine giants, but no one knows exactly how many whales are struck. This is partly because only about 10 percent of collisions are observed or reported, according to NOAA, and partly because most whale carcasses sink when they die. Only an estimated 1 to 17 percent of the carcasses of endangered whales are ever found.
The post To Save Whales From Ship Strikes, Listen Closely appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
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