Ocean 'highway' rerouted for right whales

Shipping lanes near Boston's busy port take a detour to try to prevent ship-whale collisions.

By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the July 9, 2007 edition

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Instead of frolicking and feeding in the middle of a dangerous ocean "highway" filled with massive cargo ships with sharp propellers, endangered humpback whales named Echo, Owl, Glo, and Pepper now find themselves on a much safer shoulder.

In a first-of-its-kind move in the US, ocean shipping lanes outside the port of Boston were rotated slightly to the northeast and narrowed, avoiding the highest whale concentrations – including fin, humpback, and sei – but especially the endangered northern right whale. That detour, effective as of July 1, takes ships around, not through, the whales' heaviest feeding areas off the Massachusetts coast.

The new lanes are expected to lower by more than 80 percent the likelihood of ship-whale collisions and could be a model for US ports on both East and West coasts, researchers say.

"This is one of the most significant steps taken in the US to help these endangered whales, and we're very pleased with both the direct impact, as well as the precedent it will set for other US ports," says David Wiley, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) researcher.

The lane shift was the product of four years of research, safety checks by the US Coast Guard, and approval by the International Maritime Organization, which governs international ship channels. The main impetus was to help the right whale, whose numbers have dropped to about 400 animals in the North Atlantic in large part because of collisions with ships and entanglement in fishing gear.

In the former lanes, two or three whales are hit and killed by ships each year in the 842-square-mile Stellwagen Bank Marine Sanctuary off the Massachusetts coast near the busy port of Boston.

That rate of loss is enough to make a species like the right whale extinct sometime in the next century, research has shown.

Dr. Wiley's 25 years of data showed almost 62,000 sightings of humpback, right, fin, and minke whales in the old shipping lanes – but just 12,000 sightings over that period in the new lanes.

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