The biggest problem facing whales.
How your Amazon package kills thousands of whales a year.
A sad fact about whales is they are non-buoyant. Their bodies are denser than the ocean water, so when they die that sink to the depths of the oceans. This means that most whale deaths go unnoticed. Ship strikes, which are when a whale hits a ship happens more often then you think. Some photos like the ones below show what happens when a whale gets hit, but sadly very few whales that hit ships are even noticed. between the years 2007 to 2016 1,200 whales collided with ships. Experts in this field like Micheal Fishbach founder of the Great Whale Conservancy think that the numbers are much higher than officially recorded. these most specialists believe that there might be 10x to 20x more coalitions than recorded.
The reason for this is assumptions is since whales are negatively buoyant they sink to the bottom when struck by a ship causing mass amounts of whale deaths to go unreported. Most whales reproduce every one to three years, so for recovering species of whales Like the blue and humpback whales. Ship strikes can prove fatal for repopulation attempts. currently, there are 50,000 container ships in the water right now and some eras like The Panama canal where the ships and the whale's habitats collide are where it becomes deadly.
At this point you may be wondering, why don't ships avoid whales or wales avoid ships? Turns out that it takes container ships a few miles to turn a noticeable amount. The whales, on the other hand, do not know that the ship will harm it. The sound of the ships is so loud it impairs the whale's ability to communicate. It will take whales thousands of years to figure out, ships are not safe. It is up to us, not the wales. Reachers are trying to separate the wales and ships to solve for this problem. a successful example of this is in the Panama canal. Panamas officials narrowed where the ships could go outside the canal. This limited any contact with the migrating whales. reports show that this simple step may have resulted in a 90 percent drop in ship strikes. Unfortunately there a lot of spots where narrowing where the ships can go is impossible. Another way is to makes ships have to travel only during the day in zones where there are whales. Krill which is primarily what wales eat do not like light so they go down far beneath the surface during the day forcing the whales to follow. In the night the krill return to the surface followed by the whales. The third and final solution is to slow down the ships is high impact eras. Micheal Fishbach believes that the speed of 10 knots or 12 mph will decrease that chance of strikes and lessen the severity of them. A more technological approach to this may be to put a speaker at the front of ships that warn the wales. This may take a long time because of the lack of understanding around whale speech, but the could fix the problem completely.
Micheal Fishbach has reason to believe that if wales were not negatively buoyant, people would not have tolerated this. We need people to share this article and donate, so whale conservancies like Micheal Fishbach’s Great whale conservancy can help to eliminate avoidable whale deaths. Having more whales in the oceans can help balance the ecosystem protecting even for fish from extinction.
