A rash of deaths among endangered North Atlantic right whales in 2017 has put efforts to reduce whale mortality and ship strikes high on the public agenda.
Kathy Metcalf, president of the Chamber of Shipping of America, lead the discussion on ship strikes and marine mammals at the Sustainable Ocean Summit in Halifax, Nova Scotia on 30 November. Metcalf said she and her industry have been working to find solutions to the problem for 20 years. Over that time, saving whales has become a global imperative, she said.
“I’m not proud to say this, but when this program started compliance wasn’t all that hot,” Metcalf said. “But the message got out there and now enforcement and compliance have gotten really good.”
Speed restrictions, while beneficial, lure us into “a false sense of security” that overlooks other elements, like minimizing co-location of ships and whales.
“While the mitigation needs are global in scale, the solutions to these regional situations will probably be very different. For example on the East Coast we’re focused on one species and on the West Coast we’re dealing with four species.”
In the busy shipping lanes of Long Beach and San Francisco the industry, working with NOAA and other organizations, learned that moving ship traffic closer to shore greatly reduced contact with whales. Right whale researchers in the Bay of Fundy found a three-mile move of shipping lanes reduced ship strikes by 90 percent.
“The good news is that ship strikes are relatively low or at least those that are documented,” Metcalf said. “The bad news is the sample size of collisions, particular fatal collisions, are so small you could argue that no conclusions can be made about whether we're getting better or worse. That’s a problem.”
Christopher Taggart, a professor of oceanography with Dalhousie University in Halifax, echoed much of what Metcalf said. His team’s research showed an increase in reporting of strikes, but didn’t suggest that indicates an increase in ship strikes, just more awareness of the requirement of reporting and more ships at sea.
Taggart found a willingness amount the fleet to work for a solution, but ran into a roadblock of the loss of fleet memory due to high crew turnover. To combat that, Taggart suggested that U.S. and Canadian authorities become more proactive in sending out notices to crew members on board ships passing through areas frequented by whales.
“We need more…notices going out in a more frequent basis to bring the fleet up to speed as it loses memory,” he said.
Metcalf would like to see a consolidation of regional and national programs to unify the science-based initiatives and vessel operation strategies. Specifically, she would like to see real-time dynamic reporting of whale locations. The East Coast Right Whale Program currently depends on data from traditional mating, breeding, feeding and migration habits of the whales to predict their locations, but that can be inaccurate in predicting future behavior, she said.
“Unfortunately, the right whales don’t follow a straight line,” she said. “Other species on the West Coast are quite predictable. The problem with a mandatory slow-speed area is that is it based on historical data. Do I care where a whale was last year? I care about where the whale is today, which gives us dynamic management areas. Real-time reporting is what we need going forward.”
This year, David Wiley, a research coordinator with Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration heard the industry’s request for better information and launched an app, Whalealert.org, which uses a smartphone’s GPS to provide real-time, geo-smart information displayed on a nautical chart. This should increase mariner situational awareness, enable compliance with regulations, reduce whale strikes and decrease fines, according to NOAA. It is active in all U.S. waters, the Canadian Maritimes, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Arabian Sea.
In December, NOAA, working with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Dalhousie University, will further enhance real-time location detection with the addition of acoustic detections from undersea gliders.
Pictured (L-R): David Wiley, research coordinator, Stellwagen Bank National Maine Sanctuary, NOAA; Kathy Metcalf, president, Chamber of Shipping of America; Christopher Taggart, professor of oceanography, Dalhousie University; and moderator Henk van Muijen, managing director IHC Mining BV.
