B.C.-made whale-spotting app now being used to help protect against ship strikes

Technology developed in British Columbia to help researchers better understand local whale populations is now being used to protect those same whales.

You may have heard of the WhaleReport app, developed by the Ocean Wise Conservation Association. The tool lets people who spot a whale in the wild enter the species, time and location of where they saw it.

What many people don’t know is that the tool has been expanded to communicate two ways in certain situations, communicating that whale sighting data to larger ships such as ferries, freighters, fishing boats and coast guard vessels.

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“We were bringing in all this information from on the water about where the whales are and we thought it would make sense to compile that information and send it out in real time to ships so they could avoid getting close to whales,” Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard, with the Ocean Wise Whales Initiative, said.

Vessel strikes are a continuing and real threat to wild whales.

A 2017 study by Fisheries and Oceans Canada described them as a source of mortality and injury “that can have population-level impacts,” and noted a humpback is reported injured or killed in a strike every nine months in B.C.

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Last year, Washington state ferries stuck and killed two humpbacks, while one of the animals was injured in a ship strike several weeks ago near Spanish Banks in Vancouver.

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Barrett-Lennard said the tool has been helping reduce those numbers.

“Our system looks around to see if there are any users of the whale report system within 10 nautical miles of that location, any ships in other words, and if there are it sends them a message telling them exactly what to expect,” he said.

“It’s actually kind of cool, when you’re out there on the water and you send in a sighting and you see a ship coming towards whales, sometimes you can actually see the ships slowing down or changing course a little bit.”

The system does not send out notifications to smaller vessels that would not be a danger to whales, Barrett-Lennard said, due to concerns that it could actually attract people to the animals.

Under Canadian law, boaters must keep a distance of 400 metres from orcas and 100 metres from humpbacks and other large baleen whales.