Urban Waters: Can shipping and whales coexist?

One hundred years ago, less than a whale’s lifetime, North Atlantic right whales roamed the waters off New England without fear of being run over by ships or entangled in fishing gear. The harpoon slaughter of this species by whalers had mostly ended and the Civil War was still looming large in the memories of many. During this brief respite before giant ships proliferated, whales could hear each other’s calls across many miles of ocean.

Whales that were calves and teenagers before World War I could hear the distant roar of the Gulf Stream, and understood the telltale sounds of winter storms and summer calms. Those days are gone now, the ancient quiet lost in a constant parade of ships driven by giant propellers and laden with the stuff of our modern lives.

A gauntlet now awaits the whales’ pilgrimages to calving and breeding grounds: dangerous ocean highways that drown their calls and songs, that bleach their quilted world of sound into acoustic whiteness and dissolve their exquisite hearing in a din of nothingness. As a human being as well as a scientist, I feel I must do something beyond reporting that the barn is burning and that we are getting better at knowing how brightly, at what temperature, and when it will be destroyed.

Just a few miles from where the ocean laps at the shores of Boston lives a population of great whales struggling to survive, literally calling out to anyone who might listen. Here is a story about survival and wildness, about tragedy and hope for an endangered species, unfolding just miles from the East Coast’s major cities.

Today’s oceans are so noisy that by human standards whales should be wearing earmuffs to deaden the noise. It’s nearly impossible now for them to communicate, navigate, find food, or detect predators. Those beautiful waters off Massachusetts are polluted with the acoustic smog of our consumptive lifestyles.

For me it is not enough just to provide the technical know-how or write up the scientific discussion. That alone will not make a difference for the right whales off New England. My voice must join a growing chorus to help the environment by actually doing something. Right whales need the help of media and communication experts, teachers and principals, fishermen and CEOs, students and stockbrokers, scientists and problem solvers—every one of us.

The Right Whale Listening Network (www.listenforwhales.org) is a start. Through an Internet connection, we can see where right whales are off Boston and Cape Cod, based on up-to-the minute calls detected underwater and relayed to shore and to ships. The next step is to encourage shipping companies to use this newly available information to slow down when whales are nearby. The Ship Strike Reduction Act of 2008 is poised to do just that, if enough of our senators vote for the bill in Washington this summer. By supporting organizations that speak for whales (some are listed at www.listenforwhales.org), we can make sure our voices are heard, too. We can coexist with whales in the twenty-first century, but only if we make the effort.

—Chris Clark, director,
Bioacoustics Research Program

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu