The whales don’t know about the war. The war has found them anyway.

Ships rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope to avoid Middle Eastern conflict zones are cutting through some of the planet’s densest whale habitat — and the collision risk is climbing fast.

Between March 1 and April 24, an average of 89 commercial vessels per day rounded southern Africa, according to the IMF’s PortWatch monitor. The same period in 2023 saw 44. The surge began after Houthi rebels hijacked the British-owned Galaxy Leader off Yemen in November 2023 and accelerated when the US-Israel conflict with Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz.

Research presented this month to the International Whaling Commission found that “the fastest traffic, which poses the greatest strike risk, has increased by a factor of four” off South Africa’s southwestern coast, according to Els Vermeulen, lead researcher at the University of Pretoria’s whale unit. The area supports globally significant whale populations, including humpback superpods that have fed seasonally off the country’s west coast since 2011 — a shift researchers say may be partly attributable to climate change.

Ship strikes are a “major cause of mortality for whales,” a 2024 study in the journal Science found, and are widely underreported. Vermeulen told AFP that social-media videos posted by cargo crews sailing through dense groups of humpbacks — intended as cheerful travelogues — told a grimmer story: “My heart stopped — you know that they’re striking a couple of whales.”

The fixes are straightforward. Modest shifts to push shipping lanes further offshore could reduce strike exposure by 20 to 50 percent for certain species while adding a negligible 20 nautical miles to journeys that sometimes exceed 10,000 nautical miles. MSC, the world’s largest shipping company, has already rerouted vessels off Greece and Sri Lanka for whale protection. South Africa’s environment ministry said it would examine “all available solutions and mitigation measures” once current scientific assessments conclude.

The whales have had no time to adjust. As WWF’s Chris Johnson told AFP: some species don’t flee approaching ships — they merely sink beneath them.

Sources