To keep whales safe, Coast Guard launches boat alert system in Seattle

SEATTLE — Photographer Matt McDonald had lived on Puget Sound for years but had never seen a whale, so he was thrilled when he spotted a giant marine mammal near Seattle’s waterfront one evening.

The excitement was short-lived. As McDonald tracked the whale in his camera’s viewfinder, a state ferry came into view, dwarfing the animal. The next morning he saw on the news that the humpback whale had been killed in the collision he witnessed.

“I still remember the moment when they crossed paths and my heart sank like, ‘Oh my God, the ferry just ran over the whale,’” he recalls of the encounter in 2019. “I wish I could have done something doing.”

Now, five years later, that is the case.

The U.S. Coast Guard has launched a pilot program to alert ships to whale sightings in Washington state’s Salish Sea. The purpose of the agency’s “cetacean desk” is to protect marine mammals from boat strikes and reduce noise in heavily trafficked inland marine waters.

The program, which officially launched in December, comes at a time when visits by humpback whales and marine mammal-hunting killer whales are increasing as their populations recover.

Fed by the Pacific Ocean, the Salish Sea is a maze of islands and channels that form the inland waterway between Washington State and British Columbia, including Puget Sound. Two pods of orcas – one that hunts salmon and the other for marine mammals – and baleen whales have plied these waters since time immemorial and are now often visible from Seattle’s shoreline.

But these waters are now also home to major U.S. and Canadian ports, and nearly 300,000 ships transited the area in 2023, from commercial container ships to cruise ships and ferries, the Coast Guard said. This does not apply to private crafts.

The new whale desk reduces the risk of collisions by combining observations from mariners and citizens on whale-watching apps and data from underwater listening devices into an integrated system that sends alerts to commercial ships and regional ferries via a mobile app. The warnings do not extend to private or recreational vessels.

“We’re focusing on empowering ship operators with situational awareness … so they can preemptively slow down and perhaps give a slightly wider berth to an area with a recently reported whale,” Lt. Cmdr. Margaret Woodbridge, who runs the whaling desk.

The Salish Sea is an “incredible area with a great diversity of whale species,” Woodbridge added. “And also a lot of economic activity on the waterways. And so we really try to help them thrive.”

Whale watchers can download one of two apps that contribute to the Coast Guard’s Puget Sound Vessel Traffic Service. Sailors can use radio frequencies and a telephone tip line when spotting whales. Participation in the program is voluntary for ships.

The whale desk is modeled after the Canadian Coast Guard’s Marine Mammal Desk. Both the US and Canadian agencies are built on the backbone of the Whale Report Alert System (WRAS), a program developed by Canada-based Ocean Wise, which includes observations from the individual apps and other sources such as private tracking information that is used by whale watching boats.

The four-year Salish Sea pilot program, initially established for the welfare of endangered southern resident killer whales, is the culmination of years of work by wildlife advocates, the marine industry, and state and federal agencies. It was created after U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell sponsored it in the Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2022.

“It’s really a turning point,” Kevin Bartoy, who has been chief sustainability officer for Washington state ferries for about a decade, said of the warning system.

“The number of sightings we now get on any given day is unbelievable. In principle, we can know where a whale is at any time.”

The collision between the humpback whale and the ferry was shocking for Bartoy, but underscored the need for a widely used and available early warning system. He said the ferry system was already affiliated with WRAS, but it was not widely used in Washington at the time. On the day of the collision in 2019, there had been only one warning of a whale in the area, he said.

Now the more integrated network has resulted in an exponential increase in the number of observations. The Coast Guard’s Woodbridge said reports increased 585% when comparing December 2022 and December 2023, when the agency launched and now WRAS has observations from the apps.

But the work is not done. The whale agency currently relies mainly on what people can see, making it much more difficult to spot the animals at night and in bad weather.

Bartoy said studies are underway in Canada and Washington to begin testing land-based thermal cameras that could potentially spot whales at night by seeking their warmth in the water, as well as a more robust underwater listening or hydrophone system to record whale songs to catch.

John Calambokidis, a senior biologist at the Cascadia Research Collective, said baleen whales, like humpback whales, are especially susceptible to ship collisions at night, when they spend twice as much time on the surface.

Another way to keep whales safe is to adjust shipping routes where possible, Calambokidis says. Tagging lets biologists know where humpback whales routinely congregate, but shifting shipping lanes is not currently widely discussed, he said.

Late last year, a juvenile humpback whale visited the waters off Seattle for several days, and his visit provided an excellent example of what can happen when boat operators work together, says Jeff Hogan, formerly of the Soundwatch Boater Education Program.

Hogan tracked the humpback whale as it breached, and ferries and other boaters adjusted their routes in real time to stay away from the young whale, he said.

“The fact that the Coast Guard is watching increases everyone’s behavior,” Hogan said. “It sets a standard for responsibility.”