Starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks

Would large whales even have the concept of "I need to get out of the way of this bigger thing"?

"somehow communicating via sound waves the speed, heading, and distance ..."

You'll need to speak "whale" first with this awful scheme.

A small whale is a few tonnes in mass a large one can be 150 tonnes. That is very easy to detect via SONAR.

Funnily enough a few specialised Japanese and Chinese ships are capable of detecting whales with amazing accuracy to the point of delivering small warheads.

Iceland, Japan and Norway are the culprits still supporting whaling, not China - just fyi :)

  Human morality is above any nations petty laws. Culprit is the right word for those monsters still slaughtering these magnificent creatures.

I dislike the CCP and their recent wave of propaganda as much as the next person

But I find it inconsistent to call China out for this instead of Japan. HackerNews has a tendency to jump through mental gymnastics to justify that Japan is perfect and can do no wrong. I say this after just leaving a Japanese museum 30 minutes ago that had blackface figures on exhibit

Either don’t call any country out for whaling or start by calling the countries typically deemed as more developed, advanced and progressive first. In other words, be moral relativist or if you should to be a moral absolutist then don’t pick and choose countries to exempt

Acoustic detection methods using hydrophone arrays can supplement visual AI by identifying whale vocalizations at distances of several kilometers even in poor visibility conditions.

That’s your opinion not a summary of the article though

I assume you've never been responsible for walking a young child across a busy street in traffic.

Remarkable thing death, figuring things out after it is quite difficult for many beings.

Popularly it's been reported by mariners that the whales are asleep. It makes sense, they need to stay on the surface to breathe and there's no evolutionary reason not to sleep there. It's really not that simple though because whales are unihemispheric sleepers (one brain hemisphere sleeps at a time) who need to stay partially awake because all their breathing is voluntary. They maintain a degree of awareness to their environment because of this. It could be a factor though because it's possible that some whales lapse into a deeper sleep for periods between breaths (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2007.11.003) where they aren't responsive to approaching vessels.

When I was interested in whale collisions I was surprised to read this review (https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2020.00292) which didn't even consider sleeping as a large risk factor for collision. Instead, factors included:

- They're involved in distracting behaviours such as feeding, socialising, foraging, resting, etc.

- Acoustics are complex near the surface involving surface reflections and direct paths which can interfere.

- Ships may form an acoustic shadow in front of themselves. Not only the hull shadowing the propeller, but also other hull sounds.

- Sailing vessels, which are the source of a lot of reports (harder for them to miss it happened) are quiet.

- Even when they hear an approaching vessel, some species just move slowly to avoid them.

These collisions apparently used to be much rarer. Ironically, the increasing number of whale injuries and deaths are a result of recovering populations.