YERBA BUENA ISLAND—Summer fog covers the Bay, so we can’t even spot Angel Island, let alone a gray whale. But Gary Reed, director of the U.S. Coast Guard’s Vessel Traffic Service San Francisco, still wants to know if there’s a 45-foot mammal out there, resting invisibly among the whitecaps. Maybe he can save its life.
Helping him out is a new AI-enabled thermal camera, positioned on Angel Island. Through the mist, it’s scanning the waters in front of us for the warm cloud of a whale spout: a telltale sign that a whale has surfaced in the middle of one of the Bay’s busiest vessel channels.
After a human observer confirms the camera’s sighting, the whale’s location is uploaded to the website Whale Safe. Then, radio operators down the hill at Vessel Traffic Service San Francisco—the wetter version of air traffic control—use that information to guide captains in nearby vessels around the visiting cetacean, hoping to avoid a fatal encounter. The camera has spotted whales almost every day since its May installation. “You just don’t want to hit a whale,” Reed says.
Reed saw a lot of whales over 16 years of active duty in the Coast Guard, from Alaska to New York. But he fell in love with them when he took over the Vessel Traffic Center in 2022. (Proof: He and his 20-year-old daughter have matching gray whale tattoos.) Now Reed has joined San Francisco ferry operators and bar pilots, Port of Oakland officials, marine mammal scientists, and others to help save the Bay’s grays from ship strikes, as deaths have peaked in recent years. The collaboration is “fantastic, and rather unusual,” says Greg Silber, a retired U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist who spent decades designing whale ship strike policy, including for the West Coast.
Gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) came to the Bay for a short visit at first. Recently, though, they’ve made themselves at home, lingering for months at a time into spring, as they migrate from Mexico up to Arctic feeding grounds. Like many Bay visitors, they seem to like the atmosphere, and the food—researchers have documented them hoovering up mud and the crustaceans and other snacks in it from the Bay floor. “We’re seeing brand-new biology here,” says Doug McCauley, a scientist with the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, a UC Santa Barbara-based organization. Gray whales have even become a tourist attraction, delighting Crissy Field visitors and startling kitesurfers.
But the longer they’ve stayed, the more whales have died—from starvation, sickness, and ship strikes. Gray whales, given their namesake color and their habit of hanging out just beneath the surface, are extremely vessel-vulnerable. “When you do see them, it’s too late,” says Reed. One in five visiting gray whales dies in the Bay—and about 40 percent perish from ship strikes, according to necropsies by The Marine Mammal Center. (A voluntary speed reduction program called Blue Whales, Blue Skies applies only to waters outside the Bay.) As deaths mounted last year—reaching a record high of 33 dead whales of all species, including 21 grays—scientists, lawmakers, and the public became alarmed. The Pacific gray whale population, once regarded as a conservation success story, had already halved in the past decade.
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Izgi Uygur, an independent product designer, built the website BayWhales.org to understand and explore how whale strandings in the Bay had changed over the last 20 years with data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric and Administration. Rachel Rhodes, from Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, says “this is exactly the type of map” that convinced researchers, boat captains, and more to come together to set up Whale Safe for the San Francisco Bay.
In late 2025, at a workshop gathering the whale-concerned in Sausalito, a company called WhaleSpotter presented some new gadgets—thermal cameras that could detect and classify whale spouts, and identify where a whale might be in the water. The attendees jumped on it, launching a plan to start using them for the Bay’s grays.
With funding from the Benioff lab, the first camera was placed on Coast Guard property on Angel Island in May. “It was a really good day,” says Reed. Another was installed on a San Francisco-to-Vallejo ferry, the Lyra, a few weeks later. And down in Vessel Traffic Service, Reed devoted a screen to display Whale Safe all day for operators.
Silber, after years working with policymakers and harbormasters on whale protection, says he remains “a little cynical” about efforts like this. No matter how sophisticated the technology, and how rapid the Coast Guard’s communication, a boat captain still has to decide to detour, Silber says. “It’s about changing human behavior.” He worries the promise of new technologies like thermal cameras can be used to roll back older commitments. On the East Coast, a federal proposal is attempting to remove ship speed restrictions that protect the Northern right whale in favor of “advanced, technology-based, strike-avoidance measures.”
Techno-optimistic scientists envision a world where we know where every single whale is in the Bay at all times, so boats and whales can coexist in peace. It would only take a couple more thermal cameras—perhaps on the Golden Gate, or Bay Bridge—to make that possible, says Reed. Whale Spotter’s cameras cost around $40,000, which is “relatively low for a detection technology,” says Rachel Rhodes, a scientist with the Benioff lab. Right now, Benioff has promised to foot the bill for the next five years. A bipartisan federal bill, introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in April, would establish a “whale desk” in Reed’s center to devote specific resources to whale protection. Reed and his collaborators hope they can set an example for how boats can navigate around whales in harbors and bays across the world.
If more gray whales make it out of the Bay alive, they still have a long way to go: months of swimming through ship-infested waters, usually without eating, up to the Arctic. There, amid the melting sea ice and plummeting food stores, they must consume enough food to power their 10,000-mile journey back down again to their Baja breeding grounds.
“I can only control what I control,” Reed says. “When your child leaves the house, you’re like, ‘Okay, make good decisions.’ Sometimes they will, sometimes they won’t. But… see you next Christmas.”
Mariners can report whale sightings of any species in the Bay on Channel 14 on the VHF radio.
