SMRU Consulting’s underwater hydrophone detections integrate into Ocean Wise’s Whale Report Alert System
Lime Kiln Lighthouse on San Juan Island, in the Salish Sea, Pacific Northwest. Photo credit: The Whale Museum
SMRU Consulting have been partnering with The Whale Museum on San Juan Island, Washington, since 2010 and together provide public access to an underwater listening station in the form of a cabled hydrophone situated at Lime Kiln Lighthouse. The Lime Kiln underwater listening station is within a well-documented foraging hotspot and designated critical habitat of the endangered Southern Resident killer whales (SRKW) and is part of The Whale Museum’s SeaSound Remote Sensing Network. You can listen live here: Lime Kiln live stream hydrophone.
With the long-term acoustic data collected here, SMRU Consulting have been able to quantify trends in underwater noise levels and monitor for whale acoustic presence. In addition we have been assessing the potential acoustic benefits of the voluntary vessel slowdowns that have occurred in Haro Strait since 2017, as part of the Enhancing Cetacean Habitat and Observation (ECHO) Program led by the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority (VFPA)
Lime Kiln underwater listening station on San Juan Island is marked with a yellow star and is located in an area of high likelihood of SRKW foraging (area in red) as reported by (Thornton et al. 2022) at Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) The blue area shown on the map is likely travel.
This past year (2024) SMRU Consulting have worked in partnership with the ECHO Program and Ocean Wise to integrate a new method to help protect whales from ship disturbances and collisions in BC’s waters - using automatic detections from hydrophones to alert nearby commercial mariners of whale presence via the Whale Report Alert System (WRAS). These alerts will help mariners determine when to slow down, re-route, or stop to avoid whale disturbance and injury. The addition of Lime Kiln detections to the WRAS system was just announced in an Ocean Wise Blog
Presently, members of the public are encouraged to manually report whale sightings via the WhaleReportApp created by Ocean Wise. By supplementing these citizen science whale sightings with automated acoustic alerts that detect whale vocalizations in real time, the WRAS can provide even more alerts to keep whales safe from ship strike and disturbance. Whales are social creatures and use calls, clicks, whistles, and echolocation to communicate, hunt for food, and locate each other. Acoustic monitoring dramatically improves whale detection capabilities in remote areas, especially when visibility is low (in poor weather or at night), or when cetaceans are submerged and not visible at the surface. Since the integration of the Lime Kiln underwater listening station with the WRAS in June 2024, SMRU Consulting has sent over 100 real-time whale alerts to mariners, 44% of which were issued after daylight hours, times when traditional visual whale detection methods are less effective.
Together with another underwater listening station operated by JASCO Applied Sciences in Boundary Pass, Ocean Wise expects the increasing use of hydrophones to result in more alerts generated via the WRAS, resulting in increased mariner awareness of whale presence and reduced potential for vessel strikes. When automatic WRAS detections are combined with traditional visual observer reports, including those reported by the aforementioned WhaleReport App, there is an increased level of confidence that whales passing through an area will be detected. More than 50,000 WRAS sightings have been reported to date, and alerts are immediately sent to nearby vessels. Ocean Wise have reported that more than 163,000 whale-vessel encounters have been mitigated in British Columbia since the launch of WRAS. All sightings submitted to the WRAS are verified before being included into the Ocean Wise Sightings Network database, which contains more than 150,000 sightings.
Using the opportunistic sightings submitted through the WRAS and those complied by The Whale Museum, SMRU Consulting have developed a new statistical method in collaboration with the University of British Columbia (UBC) and DFO to better describe summer SRKW habitat use. This method is currently being used by the Government of Canada to optimize protective mitigation measures in the Salish Sea.
Please keep reporting your whale sightings and remember that the sooner you report them after your observation, the more effective the protection.
(published September 2024)