But, in typical San Francisco fashion, a new piece of technology has been developed to alleviate the problem. On May 19, local scientists, conservationists, ferry operators, and government officials gathered on Angel Island\u2014a small island in the heart of the Bay overlooking the skyline\u2014to celebrate the installation of an AI-powered whale monitoring device atop its western peak.<\/p>\n
The device\u2014developed by\u00a0WhaleSpotter<\/a>, a company dedicated to whale tech\u2014uses thermal imaging to detect heat signatures from whale spouts; it pinpoints their location up to four miles away.<\/p>\n At least 118 gray whales were fatally struck by ships in the Bay from 2015 to 2024. Most injured gray whales sink straight to the bottom of the Bay. Carolyn Cole, Los Angeles Times\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Once the system\u2019s AI detects a whale, an expert who works with WhaleSpotter verifies it and posts its location to the website\u00a0Whale Safe<\/a>, where it can be monitored by anyone, including law enforcement, the public, and ship captains, who have the website open on their dashboards. Conservationists hope that this new technology will help ship captains steer clear of gray whales in San Francisco Bay and that the device on Angel Island will be the first of many.<\/p>\n Thermal detection technology is already being used to avoid strikes with\u00a0elusive orcas in the Pacific Northwest, and scientists are currently testing it on the East Coast to see if it can help reduce the number of ship collisions with critically endangered North Atlantic right whales.<\/p>\n Gray area<\/p>\n The sight of a gray whale breaching beneath the Golden Gate Bridge is undoubtedly beautiful, but\u00a0that\u00a0beauty belies an ugly truth: Gray whales don\u2019t belong in\u00a0San Francisco Bay.<\/p>\n Gray whales make the longest migration of any mammal, traveling 12,000 miles round-trip from their feeding grounds in the Arctic to their breeding grounds off the coast of Baja California. In the Arctic, they gorge themselves on bottom-dwelling crustaceans, which they catch by swimming along the seafloor on their sides and scooping up mouthfuls of mud. But outside the Arctic, these whales rarely eat. Their migrations are almost entirely powered by their fat reserves.<\/p>\n However,\u00a0climate change has reduced the amount of prey for gray whales in the Arctic,<\/a>\u00a0forcing them to embark on their epic migrations without enough gas in the tank. By the time they reach San Francisco Bay, many are starving.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat does climate change look like? It looks like skinny whales coming into the Bay, digging for food,\u201d says\u00a0Douglas McCauley<\/a>, director of the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. McCauley, who helped pioneer Whale Safe, says that before 2018, the presence of the occasional gray whale in the Bay wasn\u2019t necessarily a cause for alarm, but times have changed.<\/p>\n After humans hunted gray whales out of the Atlantic in the 18th century, the species now survives only in two Pacific populations. The larger of the two has undergone a roughly\u00a050 percent decline over the last decade<\/a>, dropping from a peak of nearly 23,000 whales to about 13,000.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery single whale that comes in the Bay, we gotta get back out,\u201d says McCauley. “If ever there was a moment to even be doing incremental gains, it would be right now.\u201d<\/p>\n Scientists say that about 40 percent of gray whale deaths this year so far in the Bay were due to ship strikes. But whales can also pass from malnutrition or other causes. Justin Sullivan, Getty Images<\/p>\n Eyes in the sky<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/4b97eb0b6e4a75c4a390c06bce87fd3e.jpeg\"\/)
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