The Marine Mammal Center and The Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory have announced a collaboration to bring Whale Safe, a technology-based mapping and analysis system to help prevent whale-ship collisions, to the San Francisco Bay Area region.
Whale Safe is on a mission to help save the incredible mammals who have ruled the oceans for tens of millions of years,” said Marc Benioff, Chair & Co-CEO of Salesforce.
Whale-ship collisions continue to be a leading cause of death for endangered whales, but with these new kinds of monitoring technology and alert systems, fatalities have begun to decline
Whale Safe technology will allow the public, media, government officials, and shipping companies and their vessel captains to go online and in near-real time, monitor ship speeds and whale presence in Northern California’s coastal waters.
In addition to providing an immediate benefit for monitoring ship speeds, the data will also be saved and analyzed by the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory and The Marine Mammal Center to help inform additional preventative safety recommendations.
Whale-vessel collisions are a global concern, so when addressing the problem and building the Whale Safe system we wanted it to be a blueprint to allow for replication and expansion into other regions
stated Callie Steffen, Whale Safe project lead at the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory.
Scientists estimate that over 80 endangered whales are killed by ship strikes off the U.S. West Coast each year.
More specifically, Whale Safe utilizes an AI-enabled acoustic monitoring system, big data models and direct whale sightings recorded by trained observers and citizen scientists. The three data streams are validated, compiled and disseminated in an easily interpreted “Whale Presence Rating” ranging from low to very high whale activity.
Additionally, shipping report cards are created to display a ship’s or company’s cooperation with voluntary vessel speed reduction zones implemented by NOAA, EPA, and the U.S. Coast Guard. This gives the captains of large vessels the data they need to know when to slow down, which is the most effective measure to drastically reduce the number of deadly ship strikes.
Whale Safe has been deployed in the Santa Barbara channel since 2020. In creating a “school zone for whales” where vessel speeds have been reduced, major shipping companies have started implementing the data and slowing down while in transit. When ships slow down, the risk of collision and fatality decreases dramatically.
Whale Safe Santa Barbara and the new San Francisco expansion will show the efficacy of this tool for other locations where whales are at risk of collision with ships, such as in San Diego, key ports along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, and international sites such as Sri Lanka, Chile, Greece and the Canary Islands, to name a few.
