Opinion: To save whales, look to the sky

Maxime Sèbe and Sophie Gourguet; PNAS January 4, 2022 119 (1) e2121360119

Figure: The aviation industry offers useful lessons for the shipping industry on how to manage wildlife collisions, which point to crucial steps for better protecting whales. Image credit: Shutterstock/Manamana.

Human activity threatens whales. Whale populations face indirect impacts such as ocean noise and pollution, as well as direct impacts from whaling, fishing gear entanglements, and ship collisions. Such collisions are believed to kill about 80 whales on the US West Coast each year. Although precise estimates have not been tabulated, whale deaths likely amount to several thousand annually worldwide.

Simple steps could reduce this toll, but these have yet to be put in place in a systemized way. With maritime traffic expanding, the threat to whales can be expected to increase. It is therefore critical that we investigate what can be learned from the management of other transport systems to reduce collision and improve whale conservation.

Shipping routes have been compared with roads, and concepts from terrestrial ecology have been borrowed to assess the direct and indirect ecological impacts from shipping on marine giants. For example, some have suggested that the addition of transition zones adjacent to maritime routes may help buffer the spread of shipping environmental impact. We extend this approach to draw lessons from the aviation industry on how to manage collisions with wildlife, lessons that point to crucial steps for better protecting the ocean’s whales

See https://www.pnas.org/content/119/1/e2121360119