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BOSTON – A new simulator allows scientists to use a joystick to swim a virtual whale on a video screen. But it's not a game, it's a serious attempt to better understand how giant mammals get entangled in fishing lines.
Tim Werner, senior scientist at the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium, hopes the technology will help design safer fishing gear and avoid the threat of extinction for whales black of the North Atlantic, seriously threatened with extinction.
"If we could see how they mingled, it would help us to prevent it. Computer technology has evolved into a state where we can model these things, "he said.
More than eight in 10 critically endangered right whales are trapped by fishing lines and nearly six out of ten are entangled more than once.
Entanglement is one of the leading causes of death in right whales. Experts estimate that there are only 440 animals left on the planet and that the future of this species is bleak because of the high mortality and poor breeding in recent years.
Werner said the video simulation helped his team better understand how whales were unintentionally – and often lethally – lost in lines of fishing buoys hanging vertically in the ocean.
Marine biologists say that entangled whales often can not feed themselves and that stress weakens them and makes females less likely to give birth to calves. This season, not a single newborn baby has been discovered.
Aquarium scientists, in collaboration with researchers from Duke University, published their findings this week in the journal Marine Mammal Science, describing how they use a standard video game console to "swim" a Computer-generated whale in very hard water to recreate an entanglement.
The simulator shows how a whale could flinch when she hits a rope, then instinctively corkscrew and rolls – to finish with the line wrapped around her body and her fins.
This also allows the researchers to reverse the simulated entanglement. Vikki Spruill, president and CEO of the aquarium, said the technology is the latest effort to work with fishers and engineers to solve the problem of entanglement. Scientists working with a grant from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration are already testing rope-free gear with changing mussels in the Gulf of Maine.
"Our mission is to find conservation measures that make a difference," Spruill said Wednesday in a statement.
Werner said the simulator accomplishes what scientists can not do in real life: testing fishing gear on whales.
"They are not numerous enough and we would not see them on purpose to be entangled," he said. In addition, it would take decades – time that the species does not have – to collect enough data.
Researchers say they could eventually use the simulator to model and study threats to other creatures in the ocean, such as leatherbacks.
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