Critics say Quiet Sound has plenty of potential allies in the Pacific Northwest’s long-established whale observation community, but maintains that the program’s early rollout has already managed to alienate some of them.
Quiet Sound will have to overcome certain tensions within the passionate community of people who have long been working on many of these issues in Washington, according to Fred Felleman, a whale biologist and environmental consultant with expertise in commercial shipping safety. Felleman also happens to be the Port of Seattle’s commission president and a board member of Maritime Blue, but is not speaking in either capacity here.
“While I’m very supportive of the program’s goals, I do have some serious concerns about its current implementation,” Felleman wrote via email.
As a close observer not permitted to participate directly in rolling out Quiet Sound, Felleman said his concerns began as the not-yet-formed organization was assembling its early partners and developing its direction.
In Felleman’s personal opinion, early planners have neglected the well-established orca-sighting and scientific communities — the type of people with “experience on the water with the whales.” That includes the whale-watching industry, which has its own industry-specific reporting app for sightings, and groups like the nonprofit Orca Network, which has been running a community science network of whale observers in Washington on a shoestring budget for 20 years.
“That’s the part I just think is an unforced error. And it creates alienation amongst the very folks that should be your closest friend,” said Felleman.
Susan Berta, co-founder and executive director of Orca Network, confirmed via email that her group feels left in the dark when it comes to Quiet Sound and its goals, though she saw promise for working together under the right conditions. Berta worries that the program’s focus on the WhaleReport Alert System and its own app in particular could potentially undermine the region’s existing whale reporting infrastructure, like that supported by her own scrappy nonprofit.
For years, Orca Network has been compiling the public’s whale sightings in Puget Sound via a hotline, email, and social media (and is supporting the imminent local expansion of a U.S.-based app). That data is, in turn, used by researchers and natural resource managers, said Berta, and the group does all of this with very little financial support. For instance, the nonprofit receives $15,000 a year from the federal government to turn its orca observations into an annual report.
If the public started funneling its local orca sightings instead to WhaleReport Alert System via the Whale Report app, Berta fears such competition might divert their members away from Orca Network and “result in loss of data for us, researchers and state and federal agencies who rely on it.”
“We have been asking and hoping for some support of the local [Washington]-based networks who have worked hard to build up our whale sightings and hydrophone networks over the last two decades,” she wrote of Quiet Sound, “but so far there are meetings and more meetings, then silence with no communication while they continue communicating with, working with, and funding Canadian efforts, which is disheartening for us.”
Aronson is aware of such concerns and hopes Quiet Sound can find an acceptable way to link other sources of data like Orca Network’s into the WhaleReport Alert System and connect real-time whale sightings directly to mariners, who right now don’t have easy access to them as they steer ships through Washington waters.
“One challenge is just finding the space that we can move things forward without re-creating the work that someone else has already done,” she said.
And while she acknowledges that Quiet Sound may have been a “black box” so far, Aronson is excited to open up the organization with many more opportunities for public engagement and outreach starting in January.
That sentiment is shared by the Port of Seattle’s Sloan, who also points to January when Quiet Sound will start reaching out to organizations the group has “unofficially slated” to participate in working groups that would kick off the program’s various initiatives. He said, “I know there’s some anxiety out there. ‘Well, how come we haven’t been invited into Quiet Sound yet?’ Well, the working groups haven’t been formed yet. So that’s when that will happen.”
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CORRECTION: This story has been corrected from an earlier version to show that an orca died after colliding with a ship not a ferry.