Speeding boats revealed as culprits weeks after dead North Atlantic right whale washes up on Virginia beach
VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA: A 14-meter North Atlantic right whale had ended up dead at the shores of Virginia Beach with serious injuries on the east coast a few weeks ago. A new study suggests that overspeeding boats are to blame as the whale likely died of collision with a boat. It was revealed on Thursday, March 9, through data compiled by the non-profit ‘Oceana’ that at least 7 out of 10 boats going on in the area had breached the speed limit. The data was put together by observing the boats to catch those that exceeded the 10-knot limit. They glowed a bright red on a series of digital maps, which helped to track the identity of every one of the boats, along with the speeds at which they traveled and their GPS location as well.
In the shocking observation, it was found that while the speed limit was 10 knots, one of the boats had been going at a staggering 23.2 knots! A member of the non-profit said that the research may help us understand how the whale had gotten injured and died. “We can reconstruct what happened with this whale and tell the story of its tragic end,” Oceana’s Gib Brogan had said. “With technology, we know where the whales are and where the boats are, and the combination of the two of them often ends up deadly.”
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The right whales are an endangered species
Yahoo! News reports that as of now, only 340 North Atlantic right whales survive, out of which 80 are breeding females. The species are endangered and their existence is threatened by possibly being struck by speeding boats, climate change, and fishing entanglements. Brogan had also opened up on what can be done to help save the species — simply slowing down and driving boats within the speed limit.
“Similar to when you drive a car past a school, there’s a slow zone…and the same thing happens with the whales. If we slow down the boats to less than 10 knots, the likelihood that a right whale is going to be killed by a boat goes down by more than 80 per cent.”
‘The damage can be catastrophic’
While the US government considers a bill to help stop the species from becoming extinct, Brogan believes that faster action must be taken to ensure the safety of the whales. “The damage can be catastrophic, causing the whale to die very soon after a strike."
In other cases, the whale is injured, either by the hull of the boat or by the propeller and they can live for months or years,” he said. “There was a whale that had the nickname of Wolverine, because it had what looked like scratch marks down its back from being hit by a propeller,” Brogan had said of another whale that had been injured by a vessel.