The museum, located in Ocean Isle Beach, joined about 60 other entities along the East Coast to send signals to ships 65 feet and longer to slow down to 10 knots in certain management areas from the beginning of November until the end of April.
Jamie Justice is the director of programs and exhibits for the Ocean Island Museum Foundation, which runs the Museum of Coastal Carolina and Ingram Planetarium.
“We've got an antenna that sends the signals out in about a 50-mile radius,” she said.
The signals work through ships' automated information systems, or AIS — which alerts crews to shipping routes and other vessels in the area. Justice said the AIS would send the speed reduction message, “and it would continue to pop up until they slowed down.”
Justice said that NOAA and MIS are working on sending alerts when a whale is spotted, and “they can send it out 15 days continuously.”
UNCW Associate Professor Dr. Michael Tift, who is also the director of the marine mammal stranding program, said North Atlantic right whales are one of the most endangered species of whale.
“There are only approximately 380 individuals left on the planet, and of those 380 individuals, about 70 of them are reproductively active adult females, who are the ones that can contribute to the population growth,” he said.
The trajectory looks bleak for the whales' survival; however, Tift said they recently had a really good calving year; they’re born in the area from Wilmington down to Florida.
“Twenty-three is more than in previous years, so it's definitely a good thing,” he said.
But for the species to recover, they need more like 50 to be born during this period.
Tift’s UNCW colleague, Dr. Tiffany Keenan, said individual calves — and all right whales for that matter — are able to be identified by aerial surveys, “because they have these callosities or kind of white patterns on their heads, so just like a fingerprint, essentially. It won't change over the lifetime, which is really cool.”
Tift adds that, unfortunately, the main reasons they’re dying off are “vessel strikes, either from large or small vessels, as well as entanglement and gear associated with fishing, and so ropes and entanglements of that nature can cause long-term damage to the animal, which can lead to a long and painful death.”
There’s also a long history of this species of whale being targeted.
“Because they were the 'right' whales to hunt. That's why they got their name: because they would float to the surface so they could collect their baleen oil,” Justice said.
While the technology would alert ships with AIS systems, the federal government had plans to potentially regulate speeds for mid-size vessels from 35 to 60 feet, but new regulatory plans ultimately didn’t pass. The planned rule change, like similar past efforts, faced pushback over potential economic impacts and navigational safety concerns (under some conditions, slower speeds can make vessels more difficult to steer).
Keenan said the type of vehicle considered by the rule are, “primarily like those large sport fishing boats that you see going out offshore to do sport fishing, kind of those-sized vessels. There was a young calf that was killed by one of them a year before last.”
There was a federal government comment period on rules around regulating these shipping speeds to protect the right whales that closed on June 2. A spokesperson from national non-profit Oceana said the proposal, if approved, would diminish the protections the species has and would “push [them] closer to extinction.”
Tift said it’s not always 100% that scientists can determine the size of the ship that struck a right whale, but “based on some of the patterns that you see in the animals and propeller scars and things like that, you can usually get a pretty good estimate of the size of the ships that the animal encountered.”
But with this AIS-based warning system, Justice hopes these vessels will slow down.
“We want to do what we can to make the ocean accessible for everyone, people and animals. And so we focus a lot on our education,” she added.
WHQR reporting on the North Atlantic Right Whales:
