Winner (134 teams) · DeltaHacks · Jan 2025

Cargo ships on busy routes keep accidentally hitting and killing blue whales. This app redraws the shipping lanes around the places whales feed and travel, so ships lose barely any time and far fewer whales die.

Why it won: Ships kill up to 20,000 whales every year, and the fix costs almost nothing: small detours and slightly lower speeds in exactly the wrong places would prevent most strikes. The app predicts where whales will be, not just where they were last seen, which is what makes rerouting practical. It is the kind of problem that persists not because it is hard, but because nobody made the answer easy to see.