Cargo ships yield to whale traffic

BOSTON — Instead of frolicking and feeding in the middle of a dangerous ocean "highway" filled with massive cargo ships with sharp propellers, endangered whales now find themselves on a much safer shoulder.

In a first-of-its-kind move in the United States, 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. The detour, which took effect July 1, directs ships around the whales' heaviest feeding areas off the Massachusetts coast.

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

"This is one of the most significant steps taken in the U.S. 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 U.S. ports," said 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 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 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 were hit and killed by ships each year in the 842-square-mile Stellwagen Bank Marine Sanctuary off the Massachusetts coast near Boston. That rate of loss is enough to make a species like the right whale extinct sometime in the next century, research has shown.

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. Those data indicate that the modest shift in shipping lanes will cut the risk of deadly collisions for right whales by 58 percent, Wiley said.

The new routes add 3.75 miles to the overall distance and between 10 and 22 minutes to each one-way trip into Boston Harbor.

Right whales travel south and winter off the coasts of Georgia and Florida, where females and calves feed. During their migration up and down the East Coast, they travel in shipping lanes. If whale concentrations can be mapped, similar lane-shift strategies might be adopted outside ports such as New York; Baltimore; Charleston, S.C.; or Jacksonville, Fla. Efforts also could be made to help the Pacific right whale on the West Coast.

The key problem, Wiley and others say, is that the data for these areas are not as extensive.