Whale Alert: A new app to reduce ships colliding with whales

A new app named 'Whale Alert' hopes to reduce collisions between ships and endangered North Atlantic Right whales by providing captains with data on where the whales are. Watch the video to see how it works.

Perhaps some of you are wondering if this would be an option for our waters. Here are a few of the problems I foresee:

1. In the past when local scientists have placed instruments in the water, in no time at all they have gone missing. Expensive equipment such as acoustic buoys are tempting to take home. If we can think of a system by which to prevent these being removed from the water, we are moving in the right direction. (please note this happens in a lot of countries around the world)

2. We don't yet know a whole lot about the blue whales calls. One thing is that they aren't chatterboxes...so what if they are there and just not making any sound that can be picked up by the acoustic buoys? As part of the blue whale project, we are collecting acoustic calls of the blue whales in Sri Lankan waters to ascertain frequency of calls etc. Lots of interesting stuff to be done in this department.

3. We cannot depend on spotter planes etc because we don't have them.

Any other thoughts? Please send them along!


Click on the link for the full article: http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2012/20120404_whale_app.html