The death of the blue whale that washed up near Santa Barbara last week was attributed to a ship collision, and a second blue found dead in Long Beach Harbor just a few days later may also have been hit. Blue whales have become common summer visitors to the Santa Barbara Channel in recent years; the recovery plan for blue whales prepared in 1998 stated that the population of blues along the California coast had risen during the two decades prior to the mid-90s. This shift was attributed to a redistribution of the Northern Pacific population, however, not a range-wide population increase. Moreover, the reason for the shift was almost certainly due to increased populations of krill here in the Channel, which is good and bad news for the whales. Some studies have suggested that blue whales are slower to respond to vessel sounds and vibrations when they are feeding, so while a rich food source is beneficial, the fact that these krill stocks occur coincidentally with enormous levels of tanker traffic, (likely to be increasing in the coming decades), does not lead one to conclude that deaths of blue whales from boat collisions in the Santa Barbara Channel will be ending any time soon.

Blue whales are currently listed as endangered under the ESA.