By Daniel Cusick | 07/02/2025 01:30 PM EDT
While the agency touts development of technology to help ships avoid whale strikes, environmentalists are calling for vessel speed restrictions.
The Rice’s whale lives in the Gulf of Mexico. NOAA Fisheries estimates there could be fewer than 100. NOAA Fisheries
NOAA says shipboard whale alert technology will be vital to maintaining the tiny population of Rice’s whales in the Gulf of Mexico as oil and gas development booms.
But tech that can allow ship captains to identify a whale crossing a vessel’s path — preventing strikes that can harm or kill the animals — isn’t yet available or even in late-stage development, experts say.
In a May 20 biological opinion, NOAA found that industry vessel strikes are a primary danger to the fewer than 100 Rice’s whales believed to be left in the Gulf — where the Trump administration wants to expand drilling. NOAA’s opinion recommends that the industry work with federal partners for two years to study Rice’s whales in areas where the mammals are known to be present, then develop and implement a “technology plan which may consist of whale detection and avoidance technology that is available within this period of time.”
The agency calls the approach a “reasonable and prudent alternative” — or “RPA” — to mitigate vessel-strike risk on the whales in a much more industrialized Gulf of Mexico, which President Donald Trump has renamed the Gulf of America.
