A community built around an urgent problem
The Whale Guardians is an international program with a single, focused mission: preventing unintentional ship strikes on the world’s great whales. Founded by conservation scientists and maritime professionals, the program aggregates whale sighting data and shipping patterns into practical, data driven routing recommendations that mariners and operators can actually use.
The scale of the problem is real. Hundreds of whales, possibly thousands, are unintentionally killed or injured by vessel strikes every year. Many of these encounters happen in coastal upwelling zones rich in food, precisely where major shipping lanes converge. Whales feeding at the surface at night, or recovering from deep dives, have almost no ability to detect an approaching hull. The propeller noise does not travel forward. The ship does not know. The outcome is often fatal.
Where vessel traffic and whale presence overlap, data can guide rerouting, speed reduction and crew awareness. The Whale Guardians help ensure these recommendations become part of optimised voyage planning.
Why SEA.AI belong here
We have been developing AI-powered vision systems for maritime environments since 2018. Our technology combines optical and thermal cameras driven by deep learning algorithms to detect objects and living beings that conventional tools miss: unlit vessels, floating debris, persons overboard, and marine animals at the surface.
Our thermal capability is particularly significant in this context. A whale surfacing at night is invisible to radar, invisible to AIS, and effectively invisible to the human eye on watch. A thermal camera detects the heat signature of a blow, a surfacing back, a fluke. It does not see below the surface, and it cannot guarantee detection in every sea state or condition. But in the moments when a whale is visible, we give the crew on watch an awareness that no unaided human eye can match, day or night.
That is the honest contribution. And it is a meaningful one.
Data that grows with every passage
We are already engaged in EU-backed scientific campaigns focused on data acquisition and whale detection in key Atlantic corridors. Working alongside marine researchers and associations, we collect real-world maritime imagery that continuously improves our ability to classify and recognise marine mammals at the surface. The technology learns. The scientific value compounds. And the network of vessels equipped with SEA.AI grows with it.
Four voices, one direction
What joining means
By becoming a member of the Whale Guardians, we are formalising our commitment to putting maritime safety technology in service of ocean conservation. We contribute our detection data, our scientific partnerships and our growing network of equipped vessels to support the program’s mission.
We do not claim to solve the problem. We claim to make the moments of detection more likely, and more actionable. In the dark, on the open ocean, that is where it starts.
