Imagine cruising to your favorite fishing spot a few dozen miles offshore and suddenly hitting something as big as a school bus. Not only would that risk your boat and, more importantly, its passengers, but it may injure or even kill a critically endangered species. A new exhibit at the Museum of Coastal Carolina in Ocean Isle Beach explains how the museum has became part of a warning network to help prevent boaters and save the lives of the North Atlantic Right Whale.
“We’ve got an antenna and a receiver, so we can we can see where boats are and broadcast a warning out up to 50 miles into the Atlantic Ocean,” said Museum Executive Director Jim Hoffman. The speed limit for boats in the protected area is 10 knots, so the system automatically detects vessels in the protected area and can send what is essentially a push notification to their GPS display and asks them to slow down if they are exceeding the limit.
The museum exhibit, installed with the help of The GPS Store of Ocean Isle Beach, shows visitors the Automatic Identification Equipment (AIS) and how it works and also includes a Stationkeeper box that connects the monitoring equipment to an antennae on the outside of the museum.
Jim said the program is an arrangement made by Jamie Justice, the museum’s director of programs and exhibits, with MotionInfo, a company in Massachusetts. Currently most of the 20 stations in the MotionInfo network are in New England, except the museum’s station. Another recently installed on the Frying Pan Light Tower is helping with the company’s goal of covering the entire East Coast.
Jamie said that the Right Whales are most active off our coast in the spring and early summer. “We’re their kind of calving areas, so down from our area, the Cape Fear, all the way down to Florida is their southeastern calving area. Around November they head back up to New England, where their main food source is,” she said.
You’ll learn from the exhibit’s signage that there are only about 370 North Atlantic Right Whales left in the wild, and Jamie said that only about 70 of those are breeding females.
“These whales are 150,000 pounds,” said Jim. “They’re the size of a school bus. These are incredible, beautiful creatures. And that’s why it’s important to protect them.
“Their impact as living creatures is enormous on the food web because they eat so much,” he said. “But then they are impacted by vessel strikes more than anything else, vessel strikes and entanglement, but probably more vessel strikes is how they meet their demise. And so a vessel hits them and the whale dies, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean and decays, and then that adversely affects the ocean.”
Jamie said that these whales play an important role in keeping up the balance of the ocean ecosystem.
“They are baleen whales, so they have baleen, which is kind of like a giant filter, and they eat zooplankton,” she said. “That helps keep the balance in the ocean because the zooplankton eat phytoplankton, which is the base of the ocean food chain. So if the zooplankton get too much, you throw off the balance of the entire ocean food chain.”
Jim said he knows that limiting speed can be a sensitive issue for commercial fisherman and charter boats who need to get to where the fish are as soon as possible.
“But I think the point that we would try to make is that we’re trying to do something that preserves the ocean so that their children and their grandchildren can the fish in the ocean too,” Jim said.
“A lot of times you don’t even realize you’re near a whale until you end up hitting it. This can help bring awareness,” Jamie added.
In the future, it is hoped that the system can be paired with whale tracking to let vessels know they are close to a whale, rather than just in the general migratory route.
The system and exhibit were installed and operational as of World Ocean Day on June 6. The display is on a wall near the museum’s touch tank in the Seashore Gallery.
