In this undated photo, a humpback whale's fluke is shown breaching the water's surface in British Columbia as a cargo ship passes nearby. A recent study led by researchers at the University of Washington found that only 7% of global hotspots for whale and ship collisions have any protections in place to protect humpbacks and other kinds of whales from this threat.
Courtesy Ocean Wise
Whether it’s smartphones or sneakers, toys or tents, about 80% of commercial goods are transported to markets around the world using giant container ships. As global shipping routes grow to meet increasing demand, so too does the likelihood of fatal collisions with whale species whose ranges overlap with them.
Researchers at the University of Washington led a team of international scientists who measured, for the first time, the risk of ship strikes worldwide among humpback, blue, fin and sperm whales. They found that 92% of global shipping traffic overlaps with the habitats of these whales. Meanwhile, only 7% of the hotspots in the world’s oceans where the risk of collisions between whales and ships is greatest have any measures in place to protect the marine mammals.
Anna Nisi is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington’s Center for Ecosystem Sentinels, and the lead author of the recently published paper. She joins us to share her findings and what might be done to protect whales threatened by the multi-billion dollar shipping industry.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to one of the many hidden costs of global trade. As shipping routes grow to meet increasing demand, so too does the likelihood of fatal collisions with whales. But there’s never been a full global picture of where these strikes are most likely until now. Researchers at the University of Washington led a team of international scientists who made a map of global shipping lanes, then overlaid the habitats of four whale species.
Anna Nisi is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington’s Center for Ecosystem Sentinels and the lead author of the paper. She joins us now. It’s good to have you on Think Out Loud.
Anna Nisi: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Miller: So, there has been no good data about where these strikes – I said fatal, but they’re not necessarily fatal – have been happening or how often they’ve been happening?
Nisi: Yes. This is a really, really difficult issue to study and that is because, often, whales sink when they’re hit. And especially for these larger vessels, a lot of times, the ship strikes go completely unnoticed even by the people on board the ships. It’s not uncommon for a ship to arrive at port with a whale draped over its bow. So that [is] just a little illustration of how easy it is to miss these things.
It’s a difficult issue to observe and study. That being said, there has been some really great work regionally on this issue for certain regions. For example, the west coast of North America and the Mediterranean are two places where there’s been a lot of really good work on this so far. But risk to whales has remained undescribed across really large areas of our planet. And so our study aims to fill that gap by taking a global view of this issue.
Miller: Are there any agreements or international laws that require these strikes to be reported if a crew member or a captain is aware of it?
Nisi: Yes, there is the International Whaling Commission, which is an intergovernmental body that does a lot of whale conservation and management work. They maintain a ship strike database. I’m honestly not 100% sure if reporting is required or not. I know that there are regions where reporting is better than others. This information is collected and maintained. But again, it’s estimated that around at least 85% of collisions go unnoticed. So you’re just not really getting a complete picture from those reports, unfortunately.
Miller: That’s an amazing point. So not even just ignored, but unnoticed. These ships are so big with cars or gigantic LEGO block containers full of stuff for us to consume that they could hit a massive marine mammal and nobody even knows.
Nisi: Yes, it’s really striking, just the size difference between, for example, a blue whale – the largest animal on our planet – and one of these container ships. The container ship can be around 10 times longer than a whale, so just so much bigger. And when you wrap your mind around the scale of these vessels, then you can start to understand how this would happen. But I agree, it does seem pretty unbelievable when you first hear about it because how on earth did someone not notice they hit a whale? But it is quite common.
Miller: So, in the absence of data about actual strikes, how did you go about building maps of potential collision hotspots?
Nisi: What we did in terms of our methods for the paper, is first we modeled whale distributions globally for our four species of interest – those were blue whales, fin whales, humpback whales and sperm whales. And those models take into account whale locations and the underlying oceanographic conditions that drive patterns of whale space use. And you use those relationships to predict where whales are likely to be in the ocean.
Then we had our whale distribution maps, we made a map of global shipping traffic. Maybe this is too in the weeds, but basically these shipping vessels have to transmit these signals called automatic identification signals. They have to transmit these signals pretty frequently for maritime safety. But you can also use those signals to map vessel traffic in space and time. So that’s what we did. And then we overlaid those two maps – our whale distribution maps and our shipping traffic maps – to get our picture of where there is high overlap between whales and ships. And that, of course, is how we identified risky areas.
Miller: Is there seasonality for both of those kinds of entities – ships or whales – going through oceans? I imagine there is for whales because we’ve talked about migrations on this show before. But what about for ship traffic?
Nisi: Yeah, there absolutely is. I mean, the seasonality is very much higher for whales because they have such striking migratory patterns relative to shipping traffic. Unfortunately, we were not able to take a dynamic look at patterns of ship strike risk, so we just looked at the average across the year. We predicted whale distribution separately for each month and then took the average of that to get sort of the annual average space use. But of course, for a certain area, seasonal patterns of whale abundance are going to change across the year.
Miller: You mentioned the four species that you focused on: blue whales, fin whales, humpbacks and sperm whales. Why those four species?
Nisi: That’s a great question. It’s really important to note that these are not, by any means, the only species that are threatened by collisions with ships. But these were four globally ranging species for whom ship strikes are known to be a big problem across some component of their range, and also for whom there was sufficient data available to do this analysis. So often, with these types of analysis you are a little bit limited by the data available. And so that contributed to how we chose our species.
Miller: So let’s turn to the key findings. What stood out to you when you looked at the hotspots around the world that, based on this data, are now associated with a higher chance of whale/ship collisions?
Nisi: I would say the two central results from our study: first, ship strike risk to whales is very widespread across the globe. Beyond just these places where this issue had been well studied before. We found high levels of risk on all continental coastlines and in all oceans, other than the Southern Ocean right around Antarctica.
Our second central result is that current levels of protection around this issue are very limited. We identified ship strike hotspots. You can think of them as like the riskiest areas for whales, so places in the top 1% of risk globally for each species. And in those ship strike risk hotspots, we found that fewer than 7% of them had any level of protection measure currently in place. Those are things like having vessels slow down or rerouting vessel traffic to avoid important habitat for whales. So 7% is a pretty low number, especially because this is only thinking about the areas of the highest, highest risk. The pretty natural follow up to take away from that is that it would be really beneficial if we could expand these protection measures to better prevent these events.
Miller: And I want to hear more about those protection measures, but we’ve heard in the past about marine protected areas [MPAs] – places that are already set aside for some version of marine life preservation. Do those offer any kind of protection of the kind that you think would be meaningful for large marine mammals?
Nisi: Yeah, so first of all, marine protected areas are a really kind of essential tool for marine conservation. However, many of them were placed and designed with the impacts of the fishing industry in mind. So relatively few of them contain any types of restrictions or regulations around shipping traffic. I think that additionally, including those types of measures in existing marine protected areas could be a really great strategy for helping address this issue, because we did find high levels of risk in many different MPAs. There are examples of this already being done in very successful programs, including in several national marine sanctuaries on the California coast, which I think could be really great models for scaling up some of these successful programs.
Miller: So you mentioned some of the ways that these risks could be mitigated by having shipping traffic slow down or even rerouting. What are some other ways that shipping boats could actually be less likely to strike whales?
Nisi: So the two strategies that I mentioned – having vessels slow down and potentially rerouting traffic away from very important areas – those are generally considered to be the most effective strategies at reducing risk to whales, especially when you’re thinking about these really large enormous container vessels and things like that. [They] have low maneuverability, and are not able to swerve and avoid a whale, for example, if they see one in front of them.
That being said, there are a number of other really useful tools and approaches, including things like improving whale detection and reporting to mariners, to alert mariners if there are whales in a particular area. There’s been some technologies that have been trying to use AI to identify when there is whale blow in front of a vessel. Again, those are potentially more useful for smaller vessels that are more maneuverable. There are many different tools in the toolbox, but the most effective ones for these large vessels are slowdowns and rerouting.
Miller: My understanding is that University of Washington researchers have created a whale monitoring system called Whale Safe. How does that work?
Nisi: Yeah, so that’s a great example of one of these detection, communication and reporting platforms. In a couple of different regions in California, the Whale Safe program – essentially, there’s several components of it. They integrate visual detections of whales, as well as acoustic detections from some underwater hydrophones and also a dynamic daily whale habitat use model that predicts how likely whales are to be in that area. You can think of it like a daily whale weather forecast. And they use that to communicate with mariners about the likelihood of whale presence in an area.
Miller: Most of the high risk zones that you’re talking about, they’re close to shores. And as I’ve read from a release about the study, they’re inside the exclusive economic zones of various countries – meaning, within the power, that sort of jurisdictional power, of individual countries. What does that mean in terms of potential conservation actions?
Nisi: So that does mean that these actions are a little bit more straightforward than they would be if all of the high risk areas were, for example, in the high seas, which are beyond any one country’s jurisdiction. Within EEZs [Exclusive Economic Zones], countries can either implement voluntary actions, like voluntary slowdowns or voluntary routings, or they can bring proposals for regulatory change to the International Maritime Organization, which is this international body that regulates global shipping traffic. But basically, it is definitely more straightforward than it would be if high risk areas were not inside of these zones of exclusive jurisdiction.
Miller: More straightforward because it’s just “up” to one country, but what is in this for Chile, or China, or Thailand, or any country? You’re saying that this is basically all over the world. What’s in it for any individual country to add a little bit of friction, in a sense, to global trade, to say when you get close here, you have to slow down or you have to go around this way? Instead of coming the fastest, most efficient way possible, we want you to slow down for whales. What’s in it for those countries, besides the lives of these whales?
Nisi: That’s a great question. I should first say that we did find that these protections are fairly limited, however they do span across the globe. There are examples of these measures in many different places. In terms of what the rationale would be besides whale protection, there are some really great other benefits that these measures can provide to people alongside whales. For example, traveling at slower speeds results in both reduced greenhouse gas emissions, as well as reduced air pollution. The program that I was talking about on the California coast, which is called Protecting Blue Whales and Blue Skies – so you can hear in the name that they have these two benefits in mind – they track reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as reduction in harmful air pollutants. It does make a really big difference to have these vessels slow down. Especially on the air pollution side, this can be a really key contributor of smog and other harmful pollutants in coastal areas for coastal communities.
Another example of one of these additional benefits is improved maritime safety. So a good example of this is off of Sri Lanka … this is a really important feeding habitat for this blue whale population that lives there. It’s also a site of really, really heavy shipping traffic and this one shipping lane pretty much hugs the southern coast of Sri Lanka. And this was causing a lot of whale deaths, and it also very tragically has resulted in deaths of people, of local fishermen who have been the victims of collisions with these large shipping vessels. So basically, it was creating very unsafe conditions for the local fishermen there. And a couple of different shipping companies have voluntarily moved their shipping lane a little bit south to create more distance between the shipping lane and the coast, to improve both safety for local fishermen as well as reduce whale collisions.
So basically, all that is to say is that there are other benefits that people receive, as well as whales, from these measures.
Miller: Anna, thanks very much.
Nisi: Thank you so much for having me on.
Miller: Anna Nisi is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington’s Center for Ecosystem Sentinels.
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