A recent preliminary assessment co-authored by Els Vermeulen found shipping around the southern point of Africa had quadrupled since December 2023, as war-driven rerouting pushed more vessels past South Africa and into whale habitat.
Who Pays for the Route Changes
The people and animals near the coast don’t get a vote in any of this. Shipping companies, military crises, and state-backed security fears redraw the map, and whales end up in the path of the traffic. Vermeulen said the surge began after the Israel-Hamas war broke out and Yemen’s Houthi rebels began attacking ships in the Red Sea. She said the problem is being made worse by the Iran war and the security crisis over the Strait of Hormuz, which is diverting even more ships around Africa.
That rerouting matters because whales don’t move through the ocean on human schedules. Gregg Oelofse, the coastal and environmental manager for the city of Cape Town, said more whales and more shipping clearly increase the risk. He said some whale carcasses wash ashore with evidence they’ve been killed by vessels. “We’ll see the propellor strike often through the whale’s body,” Oelofse said. “So, it’s like these big cuts in the whale’s body.”
A Rare Gathering, Documented by People on the Water
Chris and Monique Fallows saw nearly 300 humpback whales gathered off the west coast of South Africa last December. The South African couple said they were used to seeing bigger and bigger groups of humpbacks, but they weren’t prepared for what they found one morning when plumes of whale breath and spray burst into the air one after the other from blowholes and their boat found itself in the middle of what’s known as a supergroup.
“It was extraordinary,” said Chris Fallows, a renowned fine art wildlife photographer who has documented marine animals for 35 years. “Quite quickly we realized that there must be several hundred whales coming together in one particular area.” He said what they saw can best be described as a “Manhattan skyline” of whale breath plumes.
Chris and Monique documented 299 humpback whales in the group, they said. They count whales by taking a photograph of their tail, which is called a fluke, said Monique Fallows, an author and naturalist. Happywhale, which has a global database of whales built off photos and information sent in largely by “citizen scientists,” also counted the group. Alex Vogel, the Africa coordinator for Happywhale, said it appears to be the biggest group of humpback whales sighted.
What Recovery Looks Like Under Pressure
Scientists say the sighting shows how some whale species numbers have strongly rebounded in the southern hemisphere oceans decades after an international whale hunting ban came into effect in 1986. Humpback numbers have strongly recovered in the southern hemisphere from less than 10,000 at the height of whaling to more than 100,000 whales now, according to assessments by scientists and the International Whaling Commission, which monitors whale numbers. Only a few countries still hunt whales commercially.
Humpbacks are generally solitary or move in small pods, but they sometimes gather in supergroups in food-rich areas. They feed on krill or small fish. Sightings of humpbacks are also increasing in other parts of the Southern Hemisphere.
Els Vermeulen, the chief scientist at the University of Pretoria’s Whale Unit in South Africa, said humpback supergroups started to be seen again around 2012 and it’s likely a result of their recovery from whaling. “In general, the moratorium on whaling can be classified as one of the strongest conservation success stories in the marine environment,” said Vermeulen, who has a doctorate in zoology. Vermeulen said that humpbacks feeding in supergroups make underwater sounds that attract other whales.
The recovery hasn’t been equal across species. The World Wildlife Fund says the recovery has been mixed for other whale species and that various threats remain, like entanglement in commercial fishing equipment, collisions with ships and climate change. Seven out of the 14 great whale species are classified as endangered or vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, which number only around 380 now.
The Limits of Official Protection
Vermeulen said she and others are lobbying for official speed limits for ships near the South African coast so whales have time to spot vessels in their path. That’s the reform on offer: slower ships, after the routes have already been set by war, trade, and the machinery of global transport. The whales don’t get to lobby. They just keep surfacing where the hulls are.
Associated Press writer Gerald Imray contributed to this story.