Scubaism

How much damage can a slow big ship do? For her doctorate project, Regina Campbell-Malone of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has compressed and stressed whalebone to determine just how much it can take.

“With most problems you break them down to the simplest components possible,” she explained. “You look at bone at the tissue level to see what a small bone sample will do. It turns out the shape of the whole bone doesn’t matter so much. It’s the weakest part of the bone that’s going to break.”

Applying engineering and mathematics enable her to extrapolate from that tiny lab sample to a 500-pound bone in real life. “Another project is running a model ship into a model whale on a computer,” noted Campbell-Malone. “We’ve been working on that for three years now. There is a grad student at UNH who took measurements of a specific whale and a specific ship and put these into a computer.”

That model allows a researcher to sail at different ship speeds and clip the whale at varied angles. “Those are the two ways of looking at it — at the scale of whale bone and tissue and the full scale geometry of collision,” Campbell-Malone declared.

She has taken option one. When a dead 50-foot female right whale named Stumpy washed ashore in North Carolina three years ago, she had her chance to get a bone. “We saw one-third of the animals killed by blunt trauma had broken jaws. And we’ve never seen a right whale skeleton that had a healed jawbone,” she said. “So it’s more than likely that this injury causes death.” So it was the jaw they collected.

“We did a full necropsy and brought the [493 pound] jawbone back to Woods Hole and kept it in a freezer. We pulled it out and weighed it and used a wood corer to take samples of bone. We made many samples,” recalled Campbell-Malone.

The result is the amount of stress (force per unit area) that would break the bone. What consumes her now is translating the lab data to the physical reality of the full-size jaw. The computer will match that with potential forces up to that delivered by a 300,000-ton oil tanker.

“Thinking about the worst case; maximum impact would be from a perpendicular strike. Then it depends on how fast you are going and the mass of the ship,” Campbell-Malone said.

Her bones have all been squashed. What does it take to break a right whale? Ask her come January when the analysis is done. “NOAA is looking at the first biomechanical data on whether the speed restrictions and slowing down when there are right whales around is going to help,” Campbell-Malone said. “The data are still out as to how right whales are responding, but I think the answer is yes, speed restrictions will help.”
Some believe a slow ship just means more time for a collision. But Campbell-Malone has seen a right whale avoid electronic gear trailing behind a vessel. “Given the appropriate amount of time, they can interpret the world around them and choose a course of action,” she said. “They interpret natural signals that say ‘this is a good place to eat’. They interpret sounds from other right whales a decide whether to join or avoid them. We know they have the capability of responding to stimuli. This may include vessels – the jury is still out.”