Hydro-Help for Whales

Rare whales in the northern Atlantic have been buoyed by some good news - they're going to stop being shredded by ships' propellers. Lindsey Nield weighs anchor and finds out how you can stop a 90,000 tonne tanker in its tracks by making a noise like a submerged Robin Reliant.

Imagine you’re a whale. You’re swimming along, minding your own business - catching some food, singing a little song - when out of nowhere this giant ship crashes into you. If you were a North Atlantic right whale that could be exactly the situation you would find yourself in.

Right whales live along the east coast of America and every winter and spring many of them congregate in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, 25 miles east of Boston Harbor. Getting to the Sanctuary is a dangerous business since it bisects the official shipping lanes used by around 1,500 ships each year.

Right whale + tanker = a big blubbery mess.
Click image to enlarge.

At 70 tonnes and 55ft the right whale is one of the largest animals in the ocean but it is no contest for a 90,000 tonne tanker. The right whales were given protection from whaling in 1935, but with increased shipping traffic many have been killed in collisions. Their numbers have declined drastically since the 1980s, leaving only 400 in the world.

Studies have shown that if the deaths of one or two breeding females a year were prevented, the number of calves born would steadily increase and the right whale population would recover. To try and enable this, the Cornell lab of Ornithology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are trying to make the Massachusetts Bay shipping lanes a safer place, by deploying a network of whale detection buoys.

The Right Whale Listening Network consists of ten buoys located between inbound and outbound lanes. Each buoy is programmed to detect a distinctive whale call within a five mile radius. The buoys automatically send the detected signals to the lab where they are analysed. Once they are confirmed as whale calls, alerts are sent to a public website and to the Northeast U.S. Right Whale Sighting Advisory System, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Alerts remain in effect for 24 hours after a call is detected to protect the whales when they’re not so chatty.

A right whale 'up-call'. If you happen to be diving around Cape Cod, take some big speakers and play this - it'll cause tanker trauma.

“For the first time, we can go online and hear up-to-the-minute voices of calling whales, and see where those whales are in the ocean off Boston and Cape Cod,” said Christopher Clark, director of the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Lab of Ornithology. “Better yet, those calls immediately get put to use in the form of timely warnings to ship captains.”

Ships travelling to and from a new liquefied natural gas terminal in the Bay, built last year by Northeast Gateway Deepwater Port, are required to slow to 10 knots in response to the alerts and post lookouts so they can avoid the whales. If the lookouts prove as effective as those on the Titanic, it is hoped that the reduced speed of the ships will give the whales time to move out of the way, or that if they are hit, they won’t be killed.

Right whales are simple creatures. They spend their time skimming plankton from the waters to feed their two million calorie a day appetite. Sometimes they meet up in groups to bask, splash and flirt with each other. Let’s hope they keep on singing out because now we are listening.

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