Collisions with vessels can be fatal. When a whale or sea turtle is hit by a ship or another vessel, these gentle creatures are likely to die or suffer a horrific injury. Ship collisions have been identified as a significant human cause of baleen whales (mysticete) mortality [1].
Collisions with ships are one of the leading causes of death for endangered whales, who breed, eat and travel in deep channels in the same busy waters that cargo ships frequent. Whales that spend their lives near the surface – such as humpbacks and right whales – are especially at risk.
Even the smallest in the whale family, the dwarf sperm whale, which averages some three metres (10 feet) in length and weighs up to around 270 kilograms (600 pounds), can cause enough damage to a ship to require drydock repairs.
While an accidental collision with a sperm whale at night accounted for sinking of the Union in 1807, the Essex incident some 30 years beforehand was the only other documented case of a whale deliberately attacking, holing, and sinking a ship.
Endangered North Atlantic right whales are especially vulnerable to vessel strikes because their habitat and migration routes are close to major ports and often overlap with shipping lanes.
Frequently they do avoid vessels, except silent ones. The ocean is a noisy place. Whales seem to 'tune out' repetitive background noise like the drone of an approaching vessel.
Until the late 1970s the whaling industry was the main issue for these majestic sea mammals. Today, the two major causes of whale mortality have to do with irresponsible fishing and ship strikes – each causing approximately 20,000 deaths per year, Bray said.
About 80 endangered whales are killed off the West Coast each year by a phenomenon known as 'ship strikes,' which is when vessels unintentionally, and sometimes unknowingly, hit and kill whales.
Video footage shows it launching its body out of the water and its head slamming onto the front of a boat, tipping the rear of the vessel out of the water as it slid back into the ocean. Humpback whales can grow up to 62 feet long and weight up to 53 tons.
The ship was about 882.5 feet long (that's 269 meters) and approximately 92.5 feet (or 28.2 meters) at its widest. That's the equivalent of about 11 blue whales long and one blue whale wide.
For cruise ships, avoiding a whales requires that the captain, pilot, or other bridge personnel detect the whale at a sufficiently large enough distance to change course or speed. This often means detecting the whale several kilometers away.
Physical damages to marine life
In addition to the air and water pollution these cruise ships cause, Whales and Dolphins are also victims of the increasing traffic of these ships. These massive ships are responsible for injuring, often killing, marine lives, particularly fin whales, killer whales and humpback whales.
Dolphins follow boats out of curiosity, entertainment, and to catch a free ride with the current pressure. Dolphins burn less energy while achieving a higher speed when they swim in the wake a boat leaves behind. Dolphins may follow commercial fishing ships because they are trying to get a free meal.
British Navy mistook whales for submarines and torpedoed them, killing three, during Falklands War.
"In more than 500 interaction events recorded since 2020 there are three sunken ships. We estimate that killer whales only touch one ship our of every hundred that sail through a location," Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aviero, told Live Science.
Ship strikes are a major cause of injury or death for whales.
The Navy's permit allows up to two fatal encounters with fin whales, but the Endangered Species Act also requires the government to reevaluate its calculations if new information or factors it hadn't considered come to light.
A 747 Carried 2 Beluga Whales From China To Iceland : NPR. A 747 Carried 2 Beluga Whales From China To Iceland Naturally, transporting the whales — each about 13 feet long — was a huge logistical headache. Trainers have been preparing the belugas for the journey and for their new life in open water.
They have been reported to do it (a right whale was filmed breaching onto a boat in South America). But considering the number of boats--some extremely tiny--that share the waters with dozens of whales around Juneau, it's astonishingly rare for any whale-initiated contact to occur.
The longest blue whale on record is a female measured at a South Georgia whaling station in the South Atlantic (1909); she was 110' 17" (33.58m) long. The heaviest blue whale was also a female hunted in the Southern Ocean, Antarctica, on March 20, 1947.
The most recent target of this behavior was the Champagne, a Swiss sailing yacht that sank while being towed to shore after three orcas damaged its rudder on May 4. Before this incident, the orcas also sank sailboats in July and November 2022. (All passengers in the three incidents were safely rescued.)
How big is a whale compared to a cruise ship? Cruise ships are at least ten times larger than whales. The average cruise ship is 1,000 feet long, whereas the largest blue whales are no more than 100 feet long.
That amounts to four or five rescues each year. Any time an overboard occurs, cruise lines offer assistance to friends, family or other travel companions traveling with the passenger in question.
People very rarely disappear on a cruise ship. On average it's around 19 people that go missing each year. This is out of the many millions of cruise ship passengers that travel aboard one of the 314 cruise ships that sail the world's oceans each year.
Types of Whales
There are over 1.5 million whales worldwide, although some species like the blue whale are endangered.