![]() In fact, just a few steps from the UCSB campus, on Goleta Beach, there once operated a whaling station. However, it was with the whaling industry toward the end of the 19 th century that the carnage began, as whale blubber was still the primary source for oil, while bones and baleen yielded material for other goods. The seafaring native Chumash were known to have taken advantage of the occasional whale carcass washed ashore. There’s a long history of interaction between whales and people along the Santa Barbara Channel. Credit: Earth Media Lab/National Parks Service The Santa Barbara Channel is a hotspot for blue whales. The passive acoustic monitoring project, McCauley said, aims to build on these successes to empower researchers, shipping companies and others interested in the safety of the whales with more data with which they can plan and manage traffic in the Channel. There have been positive interventions, he pointed out, among them a voluntary agreement by the vessels to slow down while in the Channel. The Santa Barbara Channel, in particular, sees a high concentration of these large vessels, which squeeze between the mainland and the islands at the rate of roughly 2,700 per year. In fact, a huge part of the global economy is driven by ports that move goods up and down the West Coast, to and from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. “The shipping companies, of course, want to do business, and need to do business,” McCauley said. And with 11 confirmed strikes off the California coast by June, 2019 “has been on track to be just about as bad or worse” for the mammals. ![]() Scientists estimate that the actual number is much, much higher: More than 80 endangered whales are thought to be killed each year by ship strikes off the entire West Coast. ![]() Off the coast of California alone there were fourteen confirmed such strikes- a number based only on what is reported and confirmed, he explained. Ship strikes, in fact, are currently a leading cause of death for large whales.Īccording to McCauley, 2018 was the worst year on record for the number of ship strikes. These slow-growing majestic creatures, who are essential to their ecosystems, are not only still trying to recover from two centuries of intensive whaling while facing down emerging climate change-related impacts to their food sources, they also are frequently the victims of collisions with large vessels. “There are a number of species of endangered whales on the west coast of North America in the Pacific Ocean that are facing a bunch of threats,” said UC Santa Barbara marine ecologist Douglas McCauley, who also is the director of BOI. The project is part of UC Santa Barbara’s Benioff Ocean Initiative (BOI), which aims to implement science-based solutions to some of the most pressing problems in our oceans.Ī humpback whale breaches. Once post-deployment adjustments are made and bugs fixed, the equipment will take data and measurements at regular intervals. Members of the scientific collaboration recently dropped state-of-the-art acoustic monitoring equipment into the Santa Barbara Channel, which, when coupled with artificial intelligence, could signal the presence of these creatures in the heavily trafficked corridor. Their songs could be a series of status updates and spot reports, as the animals move along on their yearly migrations between breeding and feeding grounds.Īll the reasons whales sing are not definitively clear, but with help from some enterprising ecologists from UC Santa Barbara, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Texas A&M University, their songs can now be put to another important and definitive purpose: to save their lives. It could be to locate each other over long distances, or to keep each other close. ![]() It could be for courtship, or a bit of swagger. There are many possible reasons, scientists say, why blues, humpbacks and other varieties of whale vocalize. Loud, and meant to propagate over long distances, whale songs are broadcast far and wide into the open ocean, indicating the animals’ presence and their relationship to their surroundings. These chatty cetaceans burble and squeak and grunt at each other. A humpback’s call, while also often out of human range of hearing, has more variation. The song of the blue whale is haunting - sonorous, deep and often so low in frequency that our ears can pick up only parts of it.
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