As we head back to the beach, let’s save the whales

Summertime is coming, and many of us can’t wait to chill at the beach after a year of anxiety and lockdowns. In Northern California, low COVID-19 infection rates and high vaccination rates are setting the scene for a season of returning to the sand and surf.

For an ocean lover like me, beach trips are even more enticing right now because of the big boom in whales seen along our coastline. It’s amazing to have a chance of watching these majestic animals breaching, feeding or playing. But the end of the pandemic is also causing an increase in container ships and other threats to large whales.

Eleven dead whales have washed up around the San Francisco Bay Area since early April, and at least four were killed by ship strikes. Southern California has also seen dead whales recently, including a mother and baby fin whale found stuck to the hull of a military destroyer in San Diego. In April a baby gray whale was seen off San Clemente with fishing rope wrapped around its mouth — and sadly its worried mother prevented the rescue boat from getting close.

 These are just the incidents we actually know about: Scientists say we see only a small fraction of the whales that actually get entangled in fishing gear or run over and killed by ships.

As whale populations begin to recover from being almost wiped out by commercial whaling, we need to stop harming and killing them in other ways. Luckily, there are some simple solutions that would ease the psychic burden on our beachgoing souls.

Amid the high number of whales currently off California’s coast, a new monitoring and mitigation system — which the group I work for, the Center for Biological Diversity, helped put in place — caused state officials to end the commercial Dungeness crab season more than a month early this year. The goal: to help prevent deadly entanglements in fishing gear. 

It’s an example of a common-sense measure that can reduce the threat that humans pose to whales. And we’re trying to build on that success by pushing trap fisheries to convert to ropeless gear in the coming years. We don’t need to keep relying on 19th-century fishing technology that leaves thousands of hazardous vertical ropes in the water all season, just waiting to hurt or kill a whale. We can do better. 

There’s also a simple and long-overdue solution to the other main threat to endangered whales, vessel strikes. That solution is to just slow down. Exactly as speed limits save our lives on freeways, they can save whales’ lives in our oceans.

Numerous studies have shown that requiring ships to slow to 10 knots or less greatly reduces the chances of them striking and killing whales.

That’s why the federal government created 10-knot ship speed limits through important North Atlantic right whale habitat on the East Coast and why we’re petitioning to expand the scope of that rule. We’re now petitioning for similar speed limits off California to protect humpback, fin and blue whales and in the Gulf of Mexico to help save critically endangered Rice’s whales.

Slowing down ships in biologically important waters is good for whales and it reduces carbon emissions and pollution, too, helping to mitigate climate change. 

Saving whales also helps with climate change by sequestering carbon, and it ensures whales continue to play their important role of spreading nutrients and creating healthy ocean ecosystems.   

So, with Memorial Day marking the unofficial start to summer, take a moment to appreciate the whales and other marine mammals swimming past you in the deep blue as you relax on your favorite beach. Know that it’s within our power to create a world where both people and whales can thrive. 

And if you’re here in the Bay Area on June 8, which is World Oceans Day, come join our coalition of conservation groups at the Crissy Field beach for our Wake for the Whales, marking the spate of recent whale deaths with calls to protect them from ship strikes, fishing gear entanglement and climate change. 

Kristen Monsell is the Oakland-based oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, which will commemorate World Oceans Day with a Wake for the Whales marking the spate of recent whale deaths. Follow the center’s Oceans Program on Twitter:  @Endangered Ocean.