Passage II

Listening for Whales

[1]

Each spring, North Atlantic right whales migrate from their winter habitat (16) to their summer feeding grounds around Nova Scotia, Canada. Their route includes the highly industrialized coastline of New England. Because right whales tend to stay closely to the shore and feed on zooplankton near the water’s surface, the risk for them of colliding with ships moving along the busy shipping lanes in Massachusetts Bay.

[2]

[1] In the mid-1700s, right whales were hunted to near extinction, and they have yet to relapse. [2] Marine biologists estimate that fewer than 400 North Atlantic right whales exist today. [3] The researchers’ aim is to detect the presence of whales in shipping areas where the endangered whales may be and then quickly alerting nearby ships to slow down. [4] Recently, an international energy company and federal regulators has funded a group of scientists, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and Cornell University to design an underwater system to listen for these endangered right whales. (24)

[3]

This whale-detection system consists of thirteen “auto-detection buoys,” ten of which are installed along a sixty-mile belt of commercial shipping lanes in and out of Boston Harbor. [A] Each buoy is equipped with a hydrophone (an underwater microphone) that carries sound to the surface by means of a hoselike cable. [B] Data from the hydrophones are transmitted via the cables to computers that can recognize whale calls. During the months when right whales are likely to migrate through Massachusetts Bay analysts at a Cornell lab monitor the computer transmissions twenty-four hours a day. [C]

[4]

When whale calls have been detected, the analysts notify captains of ships in the area. [D] By federal law, these ships must then slow to less then ten knots (about twelve miles per hour) and post a lookout for twenty-four hours. Typically, right whales easily move around slow-moving ships. Biologists at WHOI and Cornell are optimistic that having ships reduce speed for the whales will alleviate this condition.