Janie Wray could tell there was something horribly wrong from the way her colleague gasped. They were on a research station off the coast of British Columbia and Wray’s colleague was watching live drone footage through a pair of goggles. “She just went, oh my God,” said Wray.
She had spotted a humpback whale on its migration south, swimming without the use of its tail. Wray and her colleagues at BC Whales crowded around a computer screen to watch the footage. “Immediately, we all knew that we had a whale that most likely had a broken back,” she said. It was almost certainly the result of a ship strike. Later, they discovered it was a whale they knew: Moon.
A collision with a vessel is one of the main threats to whales and if
