Blue whales lack the ability to avoid cargo ships
For millions of years, blue whales have cruised the world's oceans with hardly a care, their sheer size making them largely free from predator attacks. The downside to being the largest animals in history, however, is that the species was never pressured to evolve defensive behaviors. Now, the suggest that this lack of an evasive response might make the whales particularly susceptible to deadly collisions. "It's not part of their evolutionary history to have cargo ships killing them, so they haven't developed behavioral responses to this threat," said Jeremy Goldbogen, an assistant professor of biology at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, and the senior author on the study. "They simply have no compelling response to avoiding these dangerous ships." The study, published in Endangered Species Research, could help improve methods to protect blue whales and other marine animals from deadly ship collisions. Collisions with ships are a major threat to whales and pose a significant threat to the recovery of some endangered populations. Efforts to reduce collisions have mostly involved placing speed limits on ships passing through busy whale habitats or rerouting shipping channels around these areas altogether. However, a critical piece of information needed to make these decisions and ...
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