Hopkins scientist researches the collisions between cargo ships and whales.

Jeremy Goldbogen started studying whales by happy accident. As an undergraduate, he was offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go to the Antarctic and study how the fish there managed to survive in extreme conditions. The experience inspired him to apply to grad school, and during his years earning a doctorate, small, waterproof tracking devices were developed. He saw an opportunity.

Goldbogen began to collaborate with groups of researchers and attaching tracking tags to whales. They provided a goldmine of info, allowing Goldbogen to peek into the black box (or blue box, in this case) revealing where whales go and what they do when they’re not in sight.

Now, as an assistant biology professor at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, Goldbogen is intrigued by the fact that many whales are filter feeders, straining tiny organisms like krill to maintain their enormous masses. How do the largest mammals on Earth survive by only consuming the ocean’s smallest organisms?

Goldbogen’s research is informing whale conservation. In a paper recently published in Endangered Species Research, Goldbogen, in collaboration with researchers at the Marine Mammal Commission, the Cascadia Research Collective and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, studied potential impacts of collisions between blue whales and cargo ships in Southern California. He found that blue whales have only a very limited capacity to avoid these often fatal ship strikes.

Weekly: What was the key result of your paper, and why is it so important?

Goldbogen: We studied the movements of blue whales and ships in close proximity near the Port of Long Beach, and found that whales don’t have an adequate response for avoiding large ships that move pretty fast. It’s not like these animals have evolved with predators like cargo ships, so it’s not surprising that they have a very general, mild response to encountering one. It’s called a dip dive: Basically, they allow themselves to sink very slowly, which is probably not sufficient to avoid ship strike.

Why are ship strikes a conservation issue?

A moving ship creates a danger zone. Imagine a giant cargo ship moving toward a whale, which only knows how to avoid it using a slow, shallow dive. It could get sucked in. Whales are already at risk. Blue whales were nearly hunted to extinction, and whales are also threatened by entanglement in fishing gear and climate change. There’s a great article in ICES Journal of Marine Science by Michael Moore, called “How we all kill whales.” It deserves a wider readership.

What change can we expect from this kind of research?

I’m not comfortable answering these kinds of questions, because conservation and management are outside my expertise, but obviously, someone would have to collaborate with the shipping industry. On the East Coast, they were able to move shipping lanes to protect the migration paths of right whales, which is good, because there are so few of them.

What’s it like putting a tracking tag on a blue whale?

It’s pretty exciting, pretty exhilarating. We’re in rigid-hulled inflatable boats, and we use a long carbon fiber pole to attach a tag to whale about 20 feet away. But even at that distance, they’re so big that it’s sort of like tagging a wall.

Do you have a favorite piece of whale trivia?

It’s really interesting that whales don’t have elevated rates of cancer. Think about it: Whales have way more cells than we do, and they’re long lived, so those cells should accumulate a lot of mutations. If you extrapolate rates of cancer from smaller animals, whales should be completely full of cancerous cells. But they’re not, and no one knows why.

What should everyone know about ship strikes?

We need to understand what our impacts are. We get this stuff from all over the world, and we don’t think about the outcomes. You order something from Amazon and it shows up at your door. If we care about whales and want to keep them around, we need to understand how they’re impacted by human shipping, and basic research can help us do that.