The publicly reported death of a whale in a ship strike can spur strong public consternation. But dismay of this sort is being felt far more widely, and increasingly at a personal level, as technology permits individual whales to become ever-better-known to researchers and the whale-watching public along their migratory routes.

Fallout following the death of Fran, a humpback whale whose carcass was found on Aug. 28 on a beach just south of San Francisco, California, offers a case in point. The victim of an apparent ship strike, the 17-year-old mother of a calf had become well known both in California, where she fed, and Mexico, where she calved, in the course of her regular migrations.

“It broke my heart,” says Katherina Audley, founder of Whales of Guerrero, a nonprofit project to promote marine-conservation-friendly economic development in the Mexican state of Guerrero. “I don’t think I could work the rest of the day. I went into mourning. I felt like I had lost a friend.”

Audley first met Fran in January 2014 in the Pacific waters off Guerrero. Thousands of other whale watchers in Mexico and California likewise encountered Fran, who was named after the late wife of a whale enthusiast who had seen her in California’s Monterey Bay.

Audley was astonished by the popular response to Fran’s death, which generated about 250,000 posts on her organization’s Facebook page by the middle of September. Messages poured in from North America, Europe and Australia, she says. “I think this was a completely tragic event,” says Kathi George of California’s nonprofit Marine Mammal Center (MMC). “Fran was a friend to many people.”

George, who helped probe Fran’s death, identified the 49-foot-long humpback by posting a photo of her flukes’ distinct pigmentation patterns on the website Happywhale.com. The patterns matched those shown in photos of her uploaded to the site when she was alive.

Fran’s fame once would have been hard to achieve. But advances in photo, satellite and digital technology—and the emergence of Happywhale.com, which employs algorithms to speed photo-matching—allows researchers and the general public to track individual whales over time and thus learn about their lives.

The subject of 277 sightings on Happywhale, Fran was a celebrity. Her sudden death drew extra attention to the hazards ships pose to whales, prompting calls for stricter protections. Experts say her injuries were consistent with those caused by a collision with a large ship—blunt-force trauma, a fractured cervical vertebrae and the dislocation of her skull from her spinal column. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports 51 whales were likely killed by ship strikes in California from 2007 to 2021. Experts, however, assert the actual death toll from collisions with ships is likely far higher, since whale carcasses tend to sink to the sea bottom rather than wash up on the coast.

No small concern

A recent World Wildlife Fund report concluded that ship strikes in the eastern North Pacific were a “leading source of mortality for blue, fin, humpback and gray whales.” It said ship collisions involving blue whales could be slowing the recovery of that endangered species. The San Francisco Bay Area, the Santa Barbara Channel and the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are believed to pose a particularly high risk of whale ship-strike deaths.

On Mexico’s Pacific coast, the principal whale-safety concern has been entanglement in fishing gear. But ship strikes could become a greater worry there, too, given plans for expansion of the cruise-ship industry and a massive container-port complex in Punta Colonet on Baja California’s western coast. The risk of ship strikes is expected to grow for another reason: As climate change threatens whales’ Northern Pacific food sources, the animals are increasingly weakened and, thus, likely more vulnerable. Gray whales, for instance, currently exhibit signs of malnutrition,” says George.

In Mexico, biologist Astrid Frisch Jordán says that during the past two winters, juvenile humpbacks have been observed feeding off the Marietas Islands at the mouth of Banderas Bay, which borders the states of Jalisco and Nayarit. Calling this a “very unusual” occurrence, she says: “We’re going to see what happens this [winter]. They are definitely hungry.” Scientists say humpback and gray whales also have been observed feeding longer at marine sanctuaries in northern California, delaying their departures to Mexico by about a month.

In 2019, NOAA declared an Unusual Mortality Event (UME), or die-off, of Pacific gray whales. Although whale deaths have shown a downward trend, NOAA had logged 578 as of June 3, 2022. Of these, 279 occurred in Mexico, 278 in the United States and 21 in Canada.

Question of speed

In the United States and Mexico, strategies to curb ship strikes include voluntary and mandatory vessel-speed reductions to 10 knots or less and relocating shipping lanes during whale migrations. The strategies also involve the use of mobile applications that permit ships to communicate the presence of whales in real time. Financial incentives also are available for cargo companies that slow their vessels in California waters. “When vessels slow down they not only reduce the potential of killing a whale, but also lower their [air] emissions,” says Jennifer Stock, media liaison for NOAA’s Greater Farallones and Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuaries in California.

Stock says whale safety will be weighed as NOAA drafts its 2023 management plan for California’s Greater Farallones and Cordell National Bank Marine Sanctuaries, an area she terms “critical” for Pacific Coast whales. The subject also is expected to surface as the U.S. Coast Guard, which oversees commercial shipping lanes, gathers public input through Oct. 25 as part of a periodic review of these routes.

In Mexico, World Wildlife Fund-Mexico and the Mexican advocacy group Ecology and Conservation of Whales (Ecobac) are promoting Less Speed, More Lives, a campaign for voluntary vessel-speed reduction and respect for whales. Says Audley of Whales of Guerrero: “This is the moment to take action.”

Meanwhile, whale watchers are on the lookout for Fran’s calf, Aria, whose fate is unknown but whose flukes were photographed and posted on Happywhale before Fran’s death.