Whale ahead

Avoiding fatal strikes


Tommy Mikkelsen, Managing Director for navigation and piloting at Trelleborg, said the partnership showed how technology can help users behave responsibly toward the environment as well as have more efficient operations.

“We’re not just providing navigation tools; we’re enabling our users to be active participants in marine conservation,” he says.

According to Mitchell, a similar system Ocean Wise set up off Western Canada has been well-received by large vessel captains and pilots.

Ship strikes are the main driver of human-caused injury and death to large whales globally. Vessel traffic has increased by 300% in the past two decades and this number will continue to rise. As large vessels are increasingly transiting through prime whale habitat, the number of collisions with whales are becoming more and more frequent, with up to 20,000 fatal strikes annually.

“No one wants to hit a whale – it’s like if you’re driving a car and you do your best to avoid hitting a cat or a dog,” he explains. “But it’s also a question of reputation: it's terrible if you hit a whale and end up with it stuck to the bow of your vessel.”

From citizen science to commercial tool

WRAS has its roots in a citizen science program called the Ocean Wise Sightings Network, which the organization established off Western Canada 25 years ago. For decades, volunteers noted down whale sightings in journals and sent them to Ocean Wise by email, over the phone, or by post, helping the organization build a detailed map of whale presence.

It was ten years ago that Ocean Wise developed its app, Whale Report, allowing the public to report whale sightings in real time. Ocean Wise then used this data to develop its alert system for pilots, and captains of ferries and large commercial vessels.

“This takes that real-time data and translates it into targeted alerts to mariners, so if there's a sighting within 10 nautical miles of a mariner, they'll receive an alert on their phone or by email.”

The trial in Western Australia will rely primarily on data submitted to the Whale Report app, either by people on the coast, or by commercial or leisure mariners.

The alerts will not only cover humpbacks. Pygmy blue whales – which at up to 100 metric tons are among the world’s largest animals – migrate up the Australian west coast. Sperm whales, fin whales, and orcas are also common.

How the app can help ships and crews

Ocean Wise focuses on increasing the whale awareness of large commercial vessels as these are the ones that pose the greatest risk, both through collisions and underwater noise.

The app improves crews’ situational awareness of whales, informing their decisions on which route to take, and when to change course or slow down to minimize their impact.

Slowing down a large tanker can take half an hour or more, so when captains or their crew receive an alert, the best response will often be to change course by just a few degrees to take them further from an area where whales have been sighted. Captains involved in the program in Western Canada told Ocean Wise that they took whale sightings into account when planning routes.

Ship noise can be at similar frequencies to those whales use to communicate, crippling their interactions with one another.

“Underwater noise is often forgotten about: commercial vessels are very loud vessels as well,” Mitchell says. 

Turning feedback into action

In early 2027, once the captains and crew of vessels involved in the pilot scheme have used the upgraded SafePilot version for a year, Ocean Wise plans to survey them on which information they found most useful and how they responded to it. If the feedback is positive, Trelleborg could roll out the whale awareness feature to all SafePilot users.

“The best information comes from talking to the captains and crew themselves,” he explains. “What we've heard from Western Canada is that when they receive data, if they can respond to it, they will. But otherwise, they just appreciate having situational awareness of where the whales are.”

If captains and crew themselves also report whale sightings using the Whale Report app, this would fill in significant gaps in knowledge about the routes whales take. This would be particularly useful in the lesser trafficked stretches of the Indian and South Pacific oceans.Part of navigation safety

Part of navigation safety

Mitchell’s hope now is that other manufacturers of navigation systems for large commercial vessels follow Trelleborg’s lead and incorporate WRAS’s API into their own software, with the goal being to include whale data in Automatic Identification Systems (AIS), the automated tracking system used on ships and by vessel traffic services to enhance maritime safety, security, and navigation.

“We want to make whales part of navigation safety – the same as weather, the same as floating obstacles, the same as other vessels, and ultimately, to do that, we need to integrate the data into the software that all mariners use,” Mitchell concludes.

Writer: Richard Orange
Photo: Adobe 
Illustration: WRAS