Antarctica is one of the greatest whale watching destinations on the planet. There are few feelings quite so ecstatic as the joyful surprise when a humpback whale silently surfaces near your zodiac, and then fills the air with a krill-flavoured mist as it explosively exhales through its blowhole.
Their recovery after years of exploitation is one of conservation’s great success stories, but as more visitors head to the Antarctic Peninsula every year, it becomes ever more important to ensure that everything is done to protect them here. With this in mind, we look at how the polar cruise industry is taking new measures to do just that.
The role of Happywhale
Citizen science has been at the forefront of this move. For several years now, the Happywhale platform has been a key tool for those studying whale behaviour, particularly humpback whales. Humpbacks raise their tail flukes out of the water just before they dive, and each whale has a fluke that’s as individual as a fingerprint. By putting together digital photography and machine learning, Happywhale was able to create an open access database of individual whale sightings. It’s thought that around a third of the global humpback whale population has now been recorded by Happywhale, making it an invaluable tool for marine biologists.
Anyone going on an Antarctic cruise today is encouraged to take part in this massive citizen science project and upload their own photos of whale sightings to the Happywhale platform. As well as directly contributing to the database, you’ll get notifications if ‘your’ whale is spotted elsewhere – and if the whale is a new addition to the database, you can even get to name it, in return for a donation to a whale conservation charity. At Swoop, we’ve done just that, and even had a former team member help discover a previously unknown migration route for humpbacks between the Antarctic and the Caribbean.
Geofencing for whale safety
The thousands of humpback whale sightings recorded by expedition cruise passengers in Antarctica has been useful in another unexpected way. In 2019, enough data had been collected by the platform that it was used to propose creating a protected area in the Antarctic Peninsula where the whales were known to congregate. Members of the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators unanimously adopted mandatory procedures in the Gerlache Strait and Crystal Sound areas, to reduce the risk of accidental ship strikes from vessels.
Two years later, these measures were strengthened even further, when operators committed to a mandatory 10 knot speed restriction, and new whale watching and whale avoidance mitigation training for all bridge teams when operating in any areas where whales are routinely seen. It was a great victory for whale conservation – particularly in the krill-rich feeding areas of the Gerlache Strait, which was once a hotspot for the Antarctic whaling industry, and is now regarded as one of the best locations in the region for whale watching.
Global ship strike risk
Since the demise of industrial whaling, one of the biggest human threats to whale recovery has been accidental ship strikes – the technical term for any incident when a whale is hit by a vessel, leading to injury or even death.
A recently published study in the journal Science mapped nearly half a million locations showing whale movement in four globally distributed species, and checked them against data for global shipping activity. The researchers’ conclusions were stark: while shipping occurs across 92% of the ranges for humpback, fin, blue and sperm whales, fewer than 7% of whale hotspots have management strategies in place to reduce the chance of collisions. As global shipping continues to expand, it has become an increasing threat to the recovery of whales from centuries of exploitation.
A solution is at hand. The majority of whale hotspots are found in national, rather than international waters, making the implementation of protection strategies potentially easier to implement. The reason for this is that the great whales prefer to congregate close to continental shelves, which are typically close to coastlines, since these are the most nutrient-rich waters in which to find food.
By expanding management over just 2.6% of the ocean’s surface, the report suggests, it would be possible to achieve full coverage of the world’s whale hotspots. These strategies are also very simple, relating mainly to a ship’s speed. Today’s massive tankers simply don’t give enough time for a whale to dive or get out of their way, but reducing a ship’s speed to 10 knots can reduce whale mortality by around a third. Rerouting some shipping lanes to avoid whale hotspots is another strategy: when commercial vessels were moved away from the Hellenic Trench in the Mediterranean, a busy feeding spot for sperm whales, the collision risk was reduced by more than a quarter.
Responsible whale watching
With statistics like these, it’s vital that the Antarctic cruise industry plays its part in helping reduce the risk to these amazing animals that people travel so far to see.
It’s important to note that there is already strict guidance in place for whale encounters in Antarctica, that always puts the interests of the animal first. These apply whether you’re out in a zodiac or scrambling out onto the deck on your ship because a pod of whales was just spotted off the starboard bow.
When you’re out on a zodiac cruise, it’s forbidden to approach within 100 metres (300 feet) of a whale, and never from directly in front of or behind the animal. Close encounters – such as those moments when a whale surfaces nearby must only ever be dictated by the animal. If you’ve been out in the field, you’ll also have noticed how guides stop their engines to avoid noise disturbance, and keep all encounters to a maximum of 30 minutes, again to avoid causing any unnecessary stress.
These rules are even stricter when it comes to the ship. When there’s a whale sighting, a ship must immediately cut its speed to five knots if within 400 metres (1300 feet) and idle its engines if safe to do so. Ships must never approach feeding whales closer than 200 metres (600 feet), and when moving away from an encounter must do so at a slow enough speed not to cause a wake – and never moving in front of the whales.
Expanding protection
The geofenced protection area runs from the new year to the end of May to coincide with the greatest concentration of whales during the summer season, and lasts until they migrate north in the Antarctic winter. Its successful adoption led IAATO to create the V-CaPS Programme in 2022 (the unwieldy name stands for Voluntary Cetacean and Pinniped Sightings), asking field staff to actively record whale sightings as well as seal sightings, along the western Antarctic Peninsula as well as up into the South Shetland Islands.
‘IAATO operators have shared their whale and seal observations anecdotally for years,’ Maureen Lynch, IAATO Resource Management Coordinator told us, ‘But the V-CaPS programme provides a framework for Operators to follow, enabling them to collate this data more formally. This information then enables IAATO’s membership to make more informed management decisions to protect Antarctica’s wildlife’
Data collected through this programme has since been collated with existing scientific and historic data to expand protection even further. Whales sightings in the Gerlache Strait were once thought to be concentrated in the height of the austral summer, but the V-CaPS programme has led to the extension of the geofenced area to cover the entire Antarctic cruise season. In addition, the protected area has been expanded to cover the South Shetland Islands and Elephant Island. The latter carries particular symbolic significance, as one of the most popular of the islands to visit, Deception Island, was once home to Antarctica’s only shore whaling station.
It’s an encouraging picture. In the waters around Elephant Island, it’s becoming increasingly common to see large aggregations of feeding fin whales, where even a couple of decades ago sightings were incredibly rare. And it’s a picture that demonstrates the incredible potential for citizen science in Antarctica, through a project that all began with the simple uploading of a photograph of a set of humpback whale flukes to a remote database.
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