Mariners on the west coast of British Columbia have a new tool in their pockets to help protect whales from ship strikes and other disturbances. Ocean Wise, a global conservation organization that acts to protect and restore the ocean, has added automatic detections from hydrophones, or underwater microphones, to alert commercial mariners of the presence of nearby whales. These alerts go out on the WhaleReport Alert System, providing mariners with real-time information to reduce their impact on marine mammals.
The WhaleReport Alert System was initiated in 1999 to notify mariners of the presence of whales on their travel path, says Jessica Scott, the senior manager of the Ocean Wise Whales Initiative. “It’s a tool created by mariners and for mariners,” says Scott. The whale sightings for the alert system are supplied by community scientists, who visually identify a whale and send a report through the online WhaleReport app with GPS location. Once the sighting is verified, an alert goes out any marine professionals who are part of the program and within 10 nautical miles of the sighting.
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Adding hydrophones to the WhaleReport Alert System is a way for the program to have ears in the water without having a person present, says Scott. The hydrophones are set up at the Boundary Pass Underwater Listening Station, operated by JASCO Applied Sciences. The hydrophones are particularly useful for identifying whales in remote areas or when visibility is restricted, such as at night, during foggy weather, or in rough waters. Whales spend about 90 per cent of their time underwater, says Scott, so the hydrophones also expand the program’s ability to keep tabs on the animals below the surface.
The hydrophones provide real-time updates to the WhaleReport Alert System. This 24-hour surveillance is possible through machine learning. The machine learning detects the unique acoustic signatures of whale species, assigning each identification a confidence level, says Scott. If the confidence level passes an assigned threshold, the alert goes out to nearby mariners. Afterwards, a human goes in and verifies the identifications, helping train the machine to get better and better at identifying whale calls.
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The vessels receiving the alerts can be massive, says Scott. “There’s a lot of different things to think about in addition to not wanting to strike a whale. It takes a long time to slow these vessels down, and lots of considerations if you want to divert course.” The messages sent on the WhaleReport Alert System are designed to give mariners real-time information so they can respond to the presence of whales with the best course of action.
One species the program aims to protect is the humpback whale. On the west coast of Canada, humpback whales are a problem species when it comes to ship strikes. “They spend a lot of time foraging at the surface, and they don’t tend to move away from vessels,” says Scott. “They can be really hard to detect and their movements can be quite erratic as they’re feeding. They’re sadly struck quite frequently by ships here.”
The degree to which ship strikes affects whales remains an open question for researchers. “Unlike, say, a deer that you hit on the side of the road where you see the carcass, whale carcasses tend to sink,” says Scott. “So, unless the boat actually sees the strike, or the whale washes up on the shore and we can do a necropsy and determine that it was likely a ship strike that caused the death, it’s really hard to determine how frequently these whales are getting struck.”
But ship traffic can also have negative effects on whales in other ways. Scott points to the Southern Resident killer whale population, of which only 75 animals remain. “They’re very affected by noise,” says Scott. They’re less likely to forage when vessels are close by, she says, and the noise disproportionately affects the females of the species.
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For the WhaleReport Alert System to continue helping whales, the program relies on community scientists to submit visual sightings to accompany the hydrophone alerts. West-coasters can download the WhaleReport app on Android and iOS and share their sightings with of whales, dolphins, porpoises, and sea turtles with Ocean Wise researchers.
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