Saving whales from deadly ship collisions

By Marsha Walton
CNN

(CNN) -- Drive past a car accident, everybody slows down to look. Tell a toddler, "Don't touch that," and of course he or she does.

A U.S. Coast Guard ship assists in a 2005 attempt to disentangle a right whale from fishing gear.

Well, North Atlantic right whales are the same way.

Marine scientists say several right whales are struck and killed each year by commercial ships passing through their feeding grounds.

But when researchers blasted warning noises from ships to scare the whales away, the lumbering giants instead swam to the surface to see what was going on -- a response that put them in greater danger. Scientists found the animals are either so used to loud sounds, or so curious about them, that the noises apparently do the opposite of warning them.

"It's like living beside a train track. After a while you stop hearing the trains go by," said Angelia Vanderlaan, a doctoral candidate in oceanography at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. Since the whales were not budging, Vanderlaan and other marine mammal experts designed a plan to encourage cargo ships to take a short detour around them during certain months of the year.

Right whales, which can grow to 70 tons, were hunted to the brink of extinction until killing them was outlawed in 1935. Whaling crews dubbed them the "right" whales to kill because they moved slowly and stayed close to the surface. Today, ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear are the biggest threats to the animal.