ASOC
This guest blog was written by former professional tennis player and co-founder of the Great Whale Conservancy (GWC) Michael Fishbach.
Our organization, the Great Whale Conservancy (GWC), has been a member of ASOC for a number of years. Our mission is to “Protect the plight of the world’s great whales, with a special emphasis on the endangered blue whale.” Our primary strategy for accomplishing this is to create routing measures that separate transiting vessels from the favored habitat of all species of large whales.
Our Whale Guardians™ (WG) Program focused specifically on the creation of these routes. This process involves gathering or creating whale observational data in specific regions usually somewhat near ports and having our team which includes a master mariner create carefully designed routing documents that avoid the densest areas of whale use while always considering the safest and shortest routes for all transiting ships. In this manner we gain a very high compliance rate for our routes thereby saving as many whale lives from unintentional ship strikes as is possible. We currently have “Proof of Concept” routes in Chile, Brazil, and Greece with a number of others in the works primarily in Latin America.
The strategy that WG uses is very straightforward.
- Identify an area of ship strike concern
- Partner with a local whale expert or begin a data collection effort if none already exists
- Lobby the nearest port stakeholders to support the effort
- Use the same charts that all ship captains use to create routes that avoid the whales
- Always consider the ship captains need for a safe route for their ships
- Keep the routes as direct as possible so as to not add much time or distance to direct transits
- Inform all industry contacts so they can inform their fleets
- Inform port captains and agents so they can export the document to all incoming ships
It is important to consider that the vast majority of whales prior to the era of whaling lived in the Southern Ocean. This is especially true for the blue whale and of course the Southern Right whale both of which are endangered species. Halting ship strikes in the Southern Hemisphere therefore becomes very important in order to have the most robust recovery possible for these species that were decimated during the whaling era.
The southern nations that have ship strike problems that are in need of solutions, are as follows.
Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Uruguay, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Namibia, and Mozambique, and Indonesia. As there are many ASOC members from these nations it would be highly beneficial if discussion of recent existing observational whale data exists and where surveys need to be initiated to create the needed data. The WG program has strong relations with the shipping industry which does a few important things. First it ensures a high level of compliance to our routes, and secondly it allows for easier funding to be acquired in order to create the needed whale data in regions where it does not already exist.
As our team prepares to depart for our 30th season of whale research down in the Sea of Cortez off Baja California we all wanted to make a request of the members of ASOC and other conservation groups operating in the Southern Ocean. This comes especially as most of us have by now learned that the large whales in the Southern Ocean truly enriched that enormous ecosystem, via the vast stimulation of phytoplankton blooms from their mineral rich feces. And these very same whales are almost all negatively buoyant, meaning we cannot know and almost always vastly underestimate the number of whales unintentionally struck and killed by transiting vessels in our working areas. Therefore we ask you all to consider contacting our team so we can either see if you have the necessary recent observational data that will allow us to partner with you to create a routing document that will help save lives in your region or nation OR if we can recognize that this data is needed then we can put together a joint proposal to acquire the funds to do the surveys in order to obtain the data. Between our relations within the industry and our experience in lobbying the ports, we are very familiar with what it takes to gain a very high level of compliance from the transiting captains.
For now over and out, and if there is anything else we can do to help protect any of the marine regions down in the vast and critically important Southern Ocean do not hesitate to let us know.
-Michael Fishbach, the GWC and WG teams!
Former Professional Tennis Player Michael Fishbach has been working studying blue and other great whales for the past 32 years. 15 years ago he co-founded the Great Whale Conservancy(GWC) which is a NGO dedicated to protecting the plight of the world’s large whales. The GWC’s newest program is called Whale Guardians™ (WG). WG is now successfully routing ships to avoid critical whale habitat, and in the process of scaling this up to become a global effort to save as many great whale lives as possible.