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Gruesome images of humpback whales with propeller and boat strike injuries along Australia's east coast highlight a growing problem as the population booms 60 years after the whaling ban. Experts warn the migrating species often cannot avoid collisions.
Gruesome images of adult and juvenile humpback whales along Australia's east coast show slash and gouge injuries from boat and propeller strikes, highlighting what experts say is a growing problem.
The population is booming 60 years after the ban on whaling. Missing tail parts, deep red lacerations and shocking injuries to the spine of a whale calf can be clearly seen in the images. They were gathered by WWF Australia and shared with the Guardian. One image of fresh and broad cuts on the back of a calf was taken last month in Hervey Bay in Queensland.
Hervey Bay Whale Injuries
Many mothers choose to bring their calves there for rest and shelter on the long migration down to Antarctica. Isabel Taylor, a senior naturalist with the Pacific Whale Foundation's whale-watching tours, says the atmosphere on the town's whale-watching boats is often one of heightened excitement and elation. Last month, Taylor saw two mothers with calves come to the surface, but all was not well with one pair.
"The others were very surface active and putting on a show, but this other mum and calf were more reserved," she says. Clearly visible on the calf's back were slash marks from a boat propeller.
"The mood on the boat changed a bit," says Taylor. "We get people from all over the world and some say it's the best day of their lives. So to have this on the other end of the spectrum was quite profound," she says. Another image taken in June by drone off Sydney's Bondi beach shows a humpback with lacerations and exposed red flesh that appear to have been caused by repeated sweeps of a propeller blade.
An image from 2024 shows a female humpback off the coast of southern New South Wales known as bladerunner. She has a highly distinctive sequence of deep slashes from a propeller blade on her back and tail. Dr Raphael Mayaud, a marine ecologist at Griffith University and a member of an expert group advising the International Whaling Commission, says the images bring home the physical and direct impact humans are having on these animals, especially on animals that size.
Expert Analysis Of Cuts
Rebecca Dunlop, an associate professor and humpback expert at the University of Queensland, says most of the images showed injuries to the back and rear of the whales. This suggests they are surfacing as the boat propeller goes past and over their back.
"When migrating humpbacks travel and surface like clockwork they don't seem to be able to change their dive and travel behaviour to avoid an intercept pathway. This could be due to a boat approaching the intercept point at speed where they just don't have the time to make an avoidance decision," Dunlop says. The IWC banned humpback whaling in the southern hemisphere in 1963, after numbers had already crashed.
Soviet whalers continued to hunt them in the Southern Ocean until the early 1970s. Estimates from the 1960s put their numbers off the east coast of Australia at less than 300. It is seen by many conservationists as one of the planet's great wildlife recovery stories. By 2015, their numbers had more than trebled to 25,500.
Estimates now suggest between 40,000 and 50,000 whales are migrating up and down the coast each year. Some modelling has suggested numbers will peak and plateau this year. Dunlop and Mayaud both observe that, as populations have increased alongside the rise in popularity of boating and water recreation, the numbers of vessel strikes have also likely increased. There are more than 970,000 registered boats in Australia.
International Whaling Commission Plan
It is difficult to know how many collisions there are with both large and smaller boats, experts say. The IWC says that globally, most collisions go unseen and unreported. On Friday, the IWC passed a resolution to work with all parties around the world to reduce vessel strikes. The meeting agreed this was a priority concern for the commission.
Chris Johnson, the WWF's global lead on initiatives to protect whales, who was at the meeting, says it is an important step for the IWC.
"Humpbacks have been one of the great conservation success stories. But along Australia's humpback highway, there's growing risk for them to be hit by vessels," he says.
"Those strikes would have been incredibly painful. We can see the evidence, but we have a black hole of information," Johnson says. Injuries such as these could affect migration, feeding, body condition and reproduction. Experts say cutting speed limits for all vessels moving along migration routes would help.
Making boats and ships more aware of the riskiest places and times of the year would also help. In California, Johnson says shipping companies compete with each other to win high grades on public scorecards. These assess how well they stick to speed limits during high-risk periods for whale strikes. While Australian law in theory requires that collisions with protected species like humpbacks be reported, Mayaud says most are either undetected or unreported.
Boat Strikes Australia East Coast Whale Conservation Vessel Collisions
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