Whale Safe, backed by a tech billionaire, is a step forward, but not the only answer to avoiding collisions, biologists say
The Whale Safe project, which started in 2020 and is funded by the tech billionaire and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, hopes to overcome that challenge using artificial intelligence. It provides close to real-time data on how many whales are present in the area, and sends out alerts to shipping companies to slow their boats in the presence of the whales.
Marine biologists say the project is a good step, but not a silver bullet in addressing the core issue of whales and ships. John Calambokidis, a senior research biologist and a founder of the Cascadia Research Collective, says he welcomes the Whale Safe program because “it provides additional attention to this important threat to whales”. The system is exciting in that it adds a real-time component to advance detection capabilities, he says.
In addition, the models that the artificial intelligence is trained on, models that Calambokidis has helped to create over decades of research, aren’t very effective at predicting whale occurrence at the scale of shipping lanes.
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