Slow Down for Whales: How Global Shipping Learned to Share the Ocean

0:00 Off the coast of Southern California, scientists tracked blue whales and cargo ships at the same time, watching what happened when the two met. In more than half the encounters, the whales did something, It dove shallow and slow. It never moved sideways, not once. hundreds of ship captains now cross the same waters at slower speed on purpose because of what that study showed. We're going to talk about that on today's episode. of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin marine biologist and science communicator here to give you all the news about oceans, science, and conservation that are happening all around the oceans. Now, the four episodes that we talked about this week before this episode was all about how giant whales eat, breathe, and follow their food.

0:42 And today, we're going to talk about the biggest thing that's in their way, which is kind of interesting because it affects a lot of different whales, before we get into all that though, I want you to look around the room you're in. your phone, your shoes, your coffee maker. Most of it crossed an ocean on a container ship To get to you. global shipping feels like the least changeable thing on the planet. It's too big, too fast, too far from anything in your control. This episode is about the moment that industry slowed down for Wales and the role regular people play in making it work. I want you to think about one thing. I live in Ontario. So I live far from the East Coast and the West Coast. So I don't really think about shipping all the time. although that like, I've been covering a lot of stories that talk about increased shipping because of packages being brought all over the world, We're all global now.

1:25 We order from Amazon, we order online, it is made in in maybe Asia, and then it gets shipped over to North America many of us are listening to this, or it gets shipped over to wherever country you're in. And so I've been thinking a lot about these types of stories on the Pacific and on the Atlantic, where ships are hitting into whales or there's they have to slow down because the whales don't necessarily get out of the way. And so what I want to talk about here is just really what we can do and really understand the problem and how we can make it better, either individually or look at how our governments can make it better. Now, this week we talked a lot about different things. We talked about how whales, like they spend long stretches near the surface between dives, breathing, and recovering. We talked about how blue whale's heart is still built for calm, slow dives, where they have two beats a minute underwater and a sprint of breathing at the surface.

2:12 And having any kind of disturbance can really put that at risk. we talked about when food crowds near the coast and whales crowd with it, oftentimes it's in the busiest of waters with other fishing activities going on. I want you to put those together. Like a huge, slow-turning animal, These massive, massive whales. Spending time at the surface in the same place ships travel. and there's this thought and I guess a prediction that There's going to be more ship traffic along the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean, all the oceans, because of this demand for products across the world, as well as just shipping's going to increase because of rapid ice melting and everything. Now, there are people out there that are studying this? And I want to talk about one of them today is a team from Cascadia Research Collective.

2:54 They're based on the west coast of the United States, and they want to know what a blue whale does when a ship comes at it. So off Southern California, they put tags on blue whales and track them alongside large commercial ships, recording, 20 close passes between nine whales and passing vessels. At a distance from about 60 meters to more than three and a half kilometers. In 55% of those passes, the whale responded. It did a shallow dive during what should have been like a breathing break at the surface. And that was it. The whale never moved sideways or out of the shift's path. The dives were slow and they looked a lot like their normal behavior, just kind of getting out of the way. not making like A lunge dive or anything like that, just looking at their regular behavior. The researchers concluded that this limited set of responses leave blue whales more vulnerable to ship strikes and that the danger climbs as ship speed climbs.

3:40 So a whale sinking slowly needs time. Faster ships take that time away. the whale's doing everything it can, and it's a big animal. It takes a while for it to move. And the variable that can change is the ship. It can slow down. when a whale is hit by a ship far offshore, it usually just sinks and nobody finds it. Sometimes it's really difficult to find out if it's been hit by a ship or how many whales we actually lose to ship strikes. So for years, the number of whales killed by ships, was a guess based on the few bodies that was washed ashore. In 2017, a team led by Cotton Rockwood at Blue Point Conservation Science tried a different approach. combined maps of where whales feed with maps where the ships travel off California, Oregon, Washington, and modeled the likely deaths.

4:20 Their most cautious, covering just the peak months from July to December, came out to about 18 blue whales, 22 humpbacks, and 41 fin whales killed by ships each year. That's their most conservative estimate. For blue whales, that's nearly eight times what scientists consider the most population can lose to human causes and still recover in terms of the numbers of population. There was one hopeful detail hidden in that data. Most of the deaths, 74% for blue whales, happened in just 10% of the area. The danger was concentrated, which means that fix can be two. So here's what happened when ports, regulators, and shipping companies Decide to act within that concentrated area. Off Southern California and San Francisco, there's a program with a hopeful name Protecting Blue Whales and Blue Skies.

5:03 Air quality agencies, national marine sanctuaries, and conservation groups run it together. The ask is pretty simple. When ships pass through whale feeding areas during the season, slow down to 10 knots or less. That's about 18.5 kilometers an hour. ships that do it most of the time get public recognition with awards ranked by how often they comply. Slowing down helps in three ways. it can cut the risk of a fail whale strike engine and slower In the 2025 season, which ran from May 2025 to January 2026, 787 vessels traveled more than 481,000 nautical miles at 10 knots or less Inside the zones. that was up from 743 vessels and above 425,900 nautical miles the year before.

5:46 22 shipping lines slow down more than 90% of the time. and in 2025, the protected zone grew, adding 2,600 square miles off the Chumash Heritage Marine Natural Sanctuary off California's Central Coast. None of it was required by law. It works because companies chose to take part and kept choosing it year after year after year. The industry that almost felt impossible to change is changing, one zone at a time. The idea is taking science, putting it together, bringing stakeholders and rights holders together and saying, hey, we can actually overcome this because it's not as big as you thought. And California isn't alone. Similar voluntary slowdowns now run in other busy whale waters, including off Vancouver, where 85% of the large ships took part in 2025.

6:30 But a ship can only slow down for a whale if it knows the whale is there. That's where whale sighting apps come in. On several coasts, sightings from regular people on shore, on ferries, on small boats, feed systems that warn nearby ships, sometimes within minutes. one example is in the Pacific Northwest. an alert system fed partly by public sightings has helped mariners avoid more than 200,000 whale encounters that carried strike risk. voluntary programs depend on goodwill. Some lines still don't take part, and the zones don't cover the whole coast. Whale strike deaths are hard to measure precisely because most of the whales sink. That said, the direction is clear, More ships, more miles, more slowdowns every single year.

7:11 So one thing that you can do if you live along the coast is log every whale you see in the whale sighting app for your coast. In the US, that's whale alert. its sightings help feed whale safe, which sends whale risk ratings to shipping companies. in the Pacific Northwest. It's OceanWise's whale report app. Wherever you live, ask your local whale research group or park which app or sighting network they use. if we take it back to the beginning, a whale can only dive slowly, A ship can only slow down If someone tells it the whale's there. your sighting can be that someone. You could save whales. now in this week's episodes we talked all about the biggest animals that have ever lived. eat by finding the densest food in the ocean and they help grow it too. Their hearts beat twice a minute on a dive and need calm water to do it in.

7:54 and they follow their food wherever the ocean moves it. And crabbers learn to keep their ropes out of the water. And they can't dodge a ship. so the ships are learning to give them time. I'm hoping that these episodes help you understand how these giants work, so you can see what you can do to help it. Now, if you're off the coast of California or you live in the Santa Barbara area or you're near there, want you to think like, you know, it's summer evening in Santa Barbara Channel. a blue whale surfaces, blows, and like it rests at the surface between dives. it's so cool to see. And a few kilometers away, a container ship, the length of three football fields, is moving at 10 knots. Its captain got a whale alert 20 minutes ago. The whale breathes, the ship passes, dies back down.

8:35 to its next dense swarm. think about it: like the age of these giants is still here. Ship by ship, we're learning how to share the ocean with them. And all this week, we have to learn how things are moving, how things change in the ocean. And we have to adapt towards it, whether it's a human disturbance that gets impacted by whales coming into the area for bec because they need to find food, or It might be because ships are increasing in traffic and we need to make sure that we're not hitting these whales. There are ways that we can adapt. We just have to put the effort in doing that adaptation. We have to bring the rights holders and stakeholders together to be like, hey, how do we move forward and make sure that we protect these wonderful giants? We protect these animals that help feed all the rest of us, that help feed the ocean, that help feed the plankton, that help feeds the krill that can go in on omega-3 fatty acids.

9:25 For salmon aquaculture, for us, all these different things. We can't do it without these massive giants, these beautiful, animals. And so that's what the whole lesson is for this week is that if we put the effort into it and we dedicate the time to it, we can help these animals. We really can in a lot of great ways. And we've seen examples of how that's done here in North America and in the Southern Ocean and all over the place. So I want you to keep that in mind, but there is definitely hope to save these animals. They're not out of the woods yet and things change all the time. And we need to make sure that these animals that are slow to recover can continue to recover because they're huge and they feed the oceans and we need them. and they're beautiful to look at as well. So that's the episode for today and of course this week. I want to thank you so much for joining us.

10:07 I want to thank Ashley Blawas for you dedicating time to spend with us on Monday and sharing all this information that I can research into and giving you. these solo episodes. And I want to thank you for listening because this is awesome. I really enjoy talking about this information. I really enjoy bringing this information. And we're going to do it up next week with more episodes, starting off with an interview. don't forget to follow this podcast. And of course hit me up in the comments, the show notes in my socials, or if you want to watch this on YouTube, feel free to do that once it's up there. Check back. I'll put the links in the show notes as well. But I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode. of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.