ZIYA TONG: It’s a quiet night in the Great Bear Rainforest. It’s almost always quiet here, in this lush green landscape on B.C.’s North Coast. This temperate rainforest is crisscrossed by deep fjords that spill into the sea. The coast is dotted with small islands. And at the centre is Hartley Bay, a hub for Gitga’at First Nation, who have lived here for millennia. But they are not the only ones. If you look carefully, you might see a shadow in the deep ocean water. At first glance, it might look something like a rock or log. But after a few minutes, if you’re lucky, that shadow will explode with life, sending a column of water impossibly high into the air. This is a fin whale, a creature so elusive that this is the only place on Earth where you can observe them from land. At one time, they were driven out of these waters, and nearly to extinction. But they’re finally returning to these fjords to feast on krill—and to enjoy the quiet. The peaceful hum of underwater life, uninterrupted by human disturbance. But now…that peace and quiet is under threat.

ZIYA TONG: I’m Ziya Tong, a science broadcaster and explorer of our beautiful planet. I’ve spent my career bringing nature to people and people to nature. On this podcast, we’re meeting the incredible species that call Canada home—and the people working to protect them. From WWF-Canada, you’re listening to This Is Wild.

ZIYA TONG: When people think about whales, they imagine breaching humpbacks, singing belugas, or the iconic black-and-white pattern of an orca. Fin whales rarely make the list. 

KRISTEN POWELL: Fin whales are the second largest animal on the planet after blue whales and everyone knows blue whales. But fin whales tend to be, you know, the younger sibling that's not really paid much attention to, unfortunately.

ZIYA TONG: This is Kristen Powell. She works at WWF-Canada, where she specializes in marine conservation and shipping. She thinks that fin whales haven’t gotten the recognition they deserve.

KRISTEN POWELL: I feel like the general public just don't know a lot about them and they're often overlooked, but they're definitely out there, especially across Canada, they're in all of our waters and they play an important role in balancing our ecosystem on the coastlines.

ZIYA TONG: Like Kristen said, fin whales are huge. They’re around 25 metres long, which is about the same as two school buses parked back-to-back. So why don’t we hear much about them?

KRISTEN POWELL: Whales and marine mammals that people tend to know a lot about and generally love and feel a connection to are humpbacks and killer whales because they tend to be very active at the surface. We'll see them, you know, slapping their fins and their tails and rolling around, maybe breaching their whole bodies out of the water, and that draws people to watch them from vessels or from shore. And although fin whales are extremely large animals, they're not necessarily doing these same behaviors at the surface. They can go for long dives and they tend to be more sleek and more inconspicuous at the surface. So they're harder to see and watch for long periods of time.

ZIYA TONG: Fin whales are kind of like the introverts of the ocean. They tend to keep to themselves, travelling solo or with one or two of their babies. But that just makes it that much more exciting when they do make themselves known. 

KRISTEN POWELL: They're not often pulling their whole tail out of the water, maybe lobbing it or slapping it at the surface. When they go on deep dives, they'll kind of bend their whole body and propel themselves vertically to dive down. So sometimes you'll see that tail come out of the water as they go down several hundred meters at depth at times.

ZIYA TONG: From a distance, one way to tell which species of whale you’re looking at is by examining the way they blow water into the air when they exhale. Different whales have different blows—but fin whale blows definitely take the cake. They can shoot water up to 6 metres in the air!

KRISTEN POWELL: If you see kind of a rippling, you'll see a body kind of glimmer up, reflect off the sun, and then you see that big characteristic blow. And you can see that several kilometers away, depending on the conditions of the sea at the surface.

ZIYA TONG: Despite those sky high blows, fin whales are very hard to spot in the wild. They’re long and slender, and they tend to spend most of their time offshore, foraging in the depths of the ocean. In fact, there’s only one place on Earth where you can observe a fin whale from dry land: the Great Bear Rainforest.

JANIE WRAY: You know, a lot of times when we're out on the water, or even just standing at the station on the deck and just sort of looking out, truly you feel like you've gone back in time. That's how special this place is. There's no boats. There's just everything that's been there for thousands and thousands of years.

ZIYA TONG: This is Janie Wray. She’s been studying whales for over 25 years. And she spends most of her time observing whale behaviour in Gitga’at First Nation Territory, at a research station that overlooks one of the major channels that connects the Great Bear Rainforest to the sea. 

JANIE WRAY: The first time I saw a fin whale, I actually didn't know what I was looking at because I was so surprised because, where we were researching, there had never been a fin whale sighting for years and years, since whaling.

ZIYA TONG: In the 19th and 20th centuries, fin whales and many other kinds of whales were hunted almost to extinction by commercial whalers. When Janie saw that fin whale near the research station in 2006, no one had seen one in the area for almost 50 years.

JANIE WRAY: And this whale came up and what you notice is the body is quite long and the dorsal fin is near the back. And it just seemed like the body just went on forever. And then we saw the dorsal and then it went down and we were like…was that a fin whale?

ZIYA TONG: Every year after that, Janie and her team started to see more and more fin whales in the area. This was especially remarkable because the massive whales were swimming inland—not just along the coast, but into the fjords that weave through the rainforest. According to Janie, that’s because of the healthy ecosystem that thrives there. In other words: the whales are there for a feast.

JANIE WRAY: They spend a lot of time foraging. So when we see them go down, they can be down there anywhere from seven to 10 minutes. But a lot of times when they come up, they come back up in the same area where they went down. That indicates to us that they're down there foraging and most likely feeding on small schooling fish or krill while they're down there. And when they back up to the surface, it's to breathe.

ZIYA TONG: Fin whales are a type of baleen whale. Instead of teeth, they have hundreds of long, flat “baleen plates” made of keratin—the same material as your fingernails. When Janie says that the fin whales are “foraging,” she means they’re deep under water, gulping huge amounts of krill or small fish and sea water, then filtering the water back out through their baleen plates, keeping all of the food in their bellies. And while they’re down there foraging, they’re also letting out deep calls. 

JANIE WRAY: So when you hear it, it's like a…it's very hard for me to imitate a fin whale, but it's a little pulse, it goes, ooh, ooh, ooh. And they continuously do that. They can do that for a very long period of time and we now think that one particular call, which sounds the same, it's just at a different frequency. One is meant mainly for social interactions and the other one is for foraging.

ZIYA TONG: Fin whale calls are one of the deepest sounds produced by any animal, and they’re below the range of human hearing. Here’s a fin whale call played at 10 times speed:

ZIYA TONG: It’s only by listening to these unique calls that we can get insight into the way the whales live. 

JANIE WRAY: If you want to understand the behavior of whales and the connection they have with each other and their environment, you have to listen. Acoustics is essential. Whales spend very, very little time on the surface. Everything is happening under the water. They live in a world of sound. So they use sound the same way we use our eyesight. That's how they find each other, that's how they find their food, that's how they understand their environment, is by listening. And so, if you take that away from them, if they don't have the ability to listen, that will definitely impact their ability to survive, to find food and to develop social bonds.

ZIYA TONG: According to Janie, part of the reason that whales are drawn to the Great Bear Sea is because, historically, it’s been very, very quiet. But it’s not staying that way. In summer 2025, the first of many tankers carrying liquified natural gas from Canada to Asia left from a new facility in Kitimat, BC. The tanker, and all those that have followed, travelled down one of the channels that lead to the Great Bear Sea. And tankers are very noisy. 

JANIE WRAY: When you go to another area along the coast of BC and you listen to the ocean, you become stressed after a while, as a human. You're getting tense, you're getting a bit stressed because there's constant noise. And what we do when we're monitoring those stations is we actually go and turn the volume down because it's just too much for us. And of course, a whale can't do that.

ZIYA TONG: Usually, baleen whales can communicate with each other over thousands of kilometres. But the tanker noise goes on for a very long time, and it’s in the exact same frequency range as fin whale calls, which makes it really hard for them to hear each other.

JANIE WRAY: Imagine you're at a concert and you're trying to speak to your friend and you have to close your eyes, right? Because they don't have that ability. They can't see each other at distance. They're used to communicating with each other at distance. Fin whales, because they can vocalize at such a low frequency, they have been able to communicate, you know, across oceans. That's definitely been taken away from them, that ability to hear at such a distance with the amount of anthropogenic noise in the oceans these days.

ZIYA TONG: All that noise doesn’t just interfere with communication—it can also put whales in real physical danger.

HUSSEIN ALIDINA: With the threat of whaling gone, the ship strikes have become the new whaling.

ZIYA TONG: This is Hussein Alidina. He specializes in marine conservation at WWF-Canada, and, along with Janie, he’s one of the leads for a project called Ships, Whales, and Acoustics in Gitga’at Territory—also known as “SWAG.”

HUSSEIN ALIDINA: There’s two main goals of SWAG. One is to really try and reduce the impending threats that shipping may have on these large whales in the territory, particularly fin whales, humpback whales, and killer whales. And then it's also to build capacity so that Gitga’at are able to not only monitor but also to engage in discussions around management and reduction of threats with regards to shipping in their territory.

ZIYA TONG: The SWAG project began in 2016, when it became clear that the new LNG shipping facility in Kitimat was going to have a major impact on important whale habitat. Before construction began, fewer than 50 ships travelled through the channels of the Great Bear Rainforest each year. Once the facility is fully operational, that number could reach as high as 700 ships a year. And it’s not even the only LNG facility under construction in the area. Hussein and his colleagues at WWF, along with their local partners and members of Gitga’at First Nation, knew that documenting the territory now was crucial if they wanted to protect the whales in the future.

HUSSEIN ALIDINA: One of our biggest concerns with new shipping in the territory that you're not only opening up shipping into a place that hasn't had intensive shipping before using a new route, but, you know, we clearly don't know what the impact of that new vessel traffic is going to be. How vulnerable does a project like this with ships going through whale habitat make these whales susceptible to being struck or being hit and, you know, being injured or being killed?

ZIYA TONG: In 2023, the SWAG team published a paper about this potential impact. They projected that increased traffic from the LNG facility could kill up to two fin whales every year—along with 18 humpback whales. There would be more humpback deaths simply because there are a lot more of them in the area. But for a threatened species like the fin whale, even a couple of deaths a year could be devastating.

HUSSEIN ALIDINA: At that rate, the regional population of whales would actually decline, which is a fairly concerning situation.

ZIYA TONG: Fin whales are one of the species most likely to be struck and killed by commercial ships. And scientists have a theory as to why.

HUSSEIN ALIDINA: We can speculate that something about how they are at the surface makes them more vulnerable to these strikes. They also may just be a lot of vessels that are particularly in the whale's habitat that leads to more strikes.

ZIYA TONG: But fin whales also have a particular behaviour that puts them in harm’s way: they tend to rest just below the surface of the water, moving very slowly.

HUSSEIN ALIDINA: That puts them in a position of vulnerability when it comes to large vessels, because you can't see them from a large vessel but they're still in that subsurface zone where they could be struck by a large vessel.

ZIYA TONG: The reality is that shipping vessels are always going to be travelling along our shores. So the question becomes: what can we do to make it safer for the animals that live in those waters? Here’s WWF-Canada’s shipping expert, Kristen Powell.

KRISTEN POWELL: The easiest thing to do is for ships is to slow down. You know, the risk of lethally impacting a whale is significantly higher if you're operating at speeds of 15 to 20 knots plus, as opposed to if ships are going at slower speeds of 10 knots or lower. It increases the ability for ship operators to be able to detect and see whales visually and to be able to evade or avoid whales if they're within close proximity.

ZIYA TONG: Another fairly straightforward solution is to keep tankers out of the water after dark.

KRISTEN POWELL: Fin whales will be doing these long dives during the days, can be up to 20 minutes at a time. The longer they hold their breath, the bigger the blow will be at the surface, so that's when you'll see that large column shooting up and you'll kind of see these big blows at long distance. You'll at least have an understanding that there may be a large whale in the area.

ZIYA TONG: It’s at night that the whales tend to take a break from foraging and go into that resting travel state—hovering just below the surface of the water, taking shallow breaths every few minutes as needed.

KRISTEN POWELL: But there could be fin whales or large animals that are there. You can't see those large blows. You can't see their bodies at the surface and sometimes they can blend in really well with the waves in the darkness. When the light is low, they can look like logs.

ZIYA TONG: The thing is, even if the ships did travel more slowly and stay out of the water at night, it’s still possible for the whales to end up in harm’s way. These whales just aren’t used to there being heavy traffic in these waters.

KRISTEN POWELL: It's a bit of an unprecedented time. And what we should be doing is enhancing our protection efforts for fin whales and expanding our monitoring and protection efforts just all across the coast of BC and especially in the Great Bear Sea at this time.

ZIYA TONG: Speed and noise restrictions help, but they aren’t a cure-all. For Hussein Alidina, there’s a bigger, more uncomfortable question underneath it all. 

HUSSEIN ALIDINA: I think one of the bigger challenges is really even speed restrictions, even sort of limits on noise, at a certain point have a particular ceiling, and you cannot continue to add shipping and say these mitigations will work, or these measures will work. At a certain point it becomes about how much shipping can a habitat or a population of whales in that area that uses the habitat sustain. And I think that's a really important question that doesn't get addressed.

ZIYA TONG: And it’s not just about numbers or policy. For scientists like Janie Wray, who has watched these whales return, the fear is deeply personal. 

JANIE WRAY: We have watched these populations recover. We have actually gone from having no fin whales to suddenly having a population of well over a hundred fin whales in that particular region. And I am a little bit nervous because I think this change is going to be extremely abrupt. And we don't know. It's that unknown. We actually don't know how these whales are going to react to this sudden change in their environment. And I'm nervous. I'm nervous that they're going to disappear. There's another part of me that thinks maybe they should. Because the last thing that we want to see is an increase in vessel strikes. I am so nervous to watch one of these vessels come through, knowing that there's fin whales within the path of that tanker. And I know that it will happen. I have no doubt because there's days that we can stand on the deck of that Fin Island research station, and there are blows everywhere. It would be impossible for a tanker to come through at that time and not actually impact or strike one of these whales on certain days of the year. So I'm scared.

ZIYA TONG: Fin whales are quiet and mysterious. They communicate below our awareness and they prefer to keep out of sight. The fact that they returned to the Great Bear Sea should be cause for optimism. It’s a sign of a beautiful, vibrant, thriving ecosystem. An ecosystem worth protecting. 

HUSSEIN ALIDINA: At the end of the day, it's simple. What is the kind of planet or what is the environment in which we want to be able to live and thrive? What we do has an impact on nature, and we need to do some of those things because of how we are built as a society. But it doesn't all have to be one way. We have to find that balance, and I would say that this is an effort to find balance because it's not just about the future of the whales and biodiversity, but it's also the future of humanity.

ZIYA TONG: Thanks for joining us today on This Is Wild! I’m your host, Ziya Tong. To learn more about the impact of shipping on the whales of B.C.’s North Coast, you can head to wwf.ca/thisiswild. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on your favourite podcast app, and don’t forget to share this show with your friends! And if you have any questions or suggestions for the show, you can send us an email at thisiswild@wwfcanada.org. This Is Wild is created by WWF-Canada and Antica Productions. Our executive producers are Geoff Siskind, Laura Regehr, and Stuart Coxe. This episode was written and produced by Emily Morantz. Our production team at WWF-Canada is Joshua Ostroff, Erin Saunders, and Tina Knezevic. Nicole MacAdam is WWF's VP of Comms. Mixing and sound design by Philip Wilson.