A Call to Action: Help Us Put SCOUT to Sea

A shared commitment to solving a shared problem

The Whale Guardians strategy to mitigate ship strikes rests on three pillars working in concert. First, we collect high-integrity whale sighting data in shipping corridors - building route-specific, seasonally grounded observations where none currently exist. Second, we translate that data into evidence-based routing recommendations, delivered to navigational software via our API so that captains can act on it in real time. Third, we grow a league of certified industry partners who choose, voluntarily, to make whale-safe shipping part of how they operate. No mandates. No penalties.

Building better data

The word "voluntarily" matters here. The International Whaling Council (IWC) which operates the most extensive global ship strike database in existence - openly acknowledges that its records come with significant caveats. The data contains large gaps. Collisions with large vessels frequently go entirely unnoticed and unreported. And much of what does exist has been collected for other purposes and repurposed for ship strike analysis simply because no better alternative was available. The result is an incomplete picture, and an incomplete picture cannot reliably guide the kind of routing decisions that save whale lives. Building better data requires the cooperation of the very vessels travelling these corridors - which is why Whale Guardians works with shipping.

The Whale Guardians SCOUT is now ready for testing

Our data collection device - designed to record marine mammal positions from vessels on established coastal routes - has reached a significant development milestone. What it needs now is sea time, on the routes that matter, during the seasons that count.

That is why we are calling on you.

What we are proposing is a natural next step. In collaboration with the South African Maritime School, we would place a student aboard a vessel operating between Richards Bay and Cape Town - and, where scheduling allows, on the return voyage too. With two SCOUTs potentially at sea simultaneously along one of South Africa's most commercially significant and ecologically rich coastal corridors, we begin to generate the kind of continuous, route-specific dataset this region has never had. The data will feed our routing application which will be translated into recommendations after having enough data gathered. The routing recommendations benefit the broader industry. And your participation as the vessel operator demonstrates, in practice, exactly what the Certified Whale Guardian programme exists to celebrate.