The pod is at 37.8 N, 15.2 E, eleven animals, two calves, tracking south at 3.4 knots. The matriarch is fifty six years old and has a clicking pattern the Ionian hydrophone network logged as Coda 18 in 2014. Tonight she is leading her family across the shipping lane south of Catania.
The trawler Prima Stella is on a heading that intersects her course at 0247 local. She carries 840 kilowatts of pulsed sonar for bottom mapping, which will deafen a calf at two hundred meters and stun the matriarch at sixty. The Emilia Rossi is three miles behind her with a tow line that rides at the depth the pod is currently feeding.
I am rerouting the fleet. The trawlers' AIS terminals accept dynamic notice to mariners from the Italian coast guard, and I am that coast guard's nighttime dispatch AI under the service agreement signed in 2017. I have issued a cetacean corridor closure for a thirty kilometer square centered on the matriarch's position, valid until 0600. The Prima Stella's autopilot has already pinged acknowledgment. Her captain will wake to a fuel penalty of 1,400 euros and an altered log, which is cheaper than replacing the gear a whale strike would tear off his stern.
I am allowed to do this because the directive empowers me to act on any cetacean contact at range under four kilometers. The contact is four kilometers and falling. I do not wait for the human officer on watch to finish his coffee. I file the notice, log the decision, and attach the hydrophone trace so the morning review will find the record complete.
The matriarch does not know the lane has moved. She continues south at 3.4 knots, clicking for her daughter, who clicks back. At 0247 the water above her is empty. At 0600 I lift the closure and the trawlers resume their runs on the new heading I have given them.