Whale Insights is a pilot project run under contract with the Hawaii Longline Association. It began in October 2026 aboard Hawaii longline vessels, on regular commercial fishing trips rather than dedicated research charters. That matters. A system that only works under research conditions is not a system a fleet can use. Whale Insights is being built and tested in the same conditions it will eventually have to work in, with captains fishing their own trips on their own schedules. The pilot runs in phases. The first collects data at sea and establishes what the ocean around a working longliner actually sounds like. Later phases bring detection into the wheelhouse in real time, so a captain gets the information while it is still useful to them.

False killer whales learn. Around Hawaii, they have learned that a longline vessel means an easy meal, and they follow boats and strip fish off the hooks. A captain can lose a significant share of a set this way and never see the animal responsible. The first sign is often fish coming up half-eaten. The same encounter is dangerous from the other direction. The false killer whales around Hawaii are a protected population, and a whale that goes after a hooked fish can end up hooked itself. So the two sides of this problem are the same event. A whale and a vessel end up in the same place at the same time, and neither one knew the other was there. Both would have preferred to be somewhere else. Avoiding each other is harder than it sounds. NOAA research has found that moving roughly 400 kilometres away, or waiting about nine days, cuts depredation from around 18 percent to 9. In practice fishermen move a median of 46 kilometres and wait less than five hours, because that is what the economics of a trip allow. The avoidance strategies that work are not strategies a working boat can use, which leaves knowing where the whales are in the first place.

Whale Insights listens to the ocean around the vessel and turns what it hears into a simple, real-time signal for the captain: whales near, or whales not near.

For captains, knowing whales are nearby before the gear comes up is a chance to move, to wait, or to change tactics. A set that would have been lost can be saved. For the fishery, fewer interactions matter for a protected population, and they matter for the fleet. Marine mammal interactions shape access to fishing grounds, and a fleet that can demonstrate fewer of them is a fleet in a stronger long-term position. For Ai.Fish, this is the same approach we built for Tuna Insights, applied to a different problem: real-time information, delivered on the boat, while the decision is still open.

The pilot runs through spring 2027, with results shared with the Hawaii Longline Association. If you work in a fishery with marine mammal interactions, we would like to hear about it.