This marine biologist discovered a unique blue whale population in Sri Lanka

The whales changed the course of Asha de Vos’ career.

Sri Lanka’s marine biologist was on board a research vessel near her island in 2003 when she spotted six blue whales congregating. A bright red plume of whale debris was spreading across the surface of the water.

De Vos, then a master’s student, recalls being “super excited”. What she witnessed went against prevailing dogma: Her textbooks and professors had taught that blue whales, like other large whales, embark on long-distance migrations between cooler feeding grounds and warmer breeding and calving grounds. But seeing whales basking in tropical waters meant the giants had to party instead.

Intrigued, de Vos spent the next few years documenting how blue whales near Sri Lanka differ from those elsewhere in the world. First, the population feeds on shrimp and not krill. Whales also have unique songs. But the main difference, she realized, is that they remain year-round in the waters between Sri Lanka, Oman and the Maldives – making them the only non-migratory blue whales in the world. Abundant upwellings of nutrient-rich water from the ocean depths support a steady food supply for the whales.

Eventually, the International Whaling Commission, the intergovernmental body dedicated to protecting whales, recognized Sri Lankan blue whales as a distinct subspecies called Balaenoptera musculus indica.

That distinction is crucial to conservation management, explains retired whale biologist Phillip Clapham, formerly of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service. Small, localized populations – like the one in Sri Lanka – face higher risks of extinction in the face of environmental or human threats, such as deep-sea mining.

More than two decades later, de Vos is now one of Sri Lanka’s best-known scientists – famous for nurturing the country’s nascent marine biology scene. She is also an ardent champion for greater diversity among researchers in ocean conservation.

De Vos has won numerous accolades, including being named a National Geographic Explorer, a TED senior fellow and one of the BBC’s 100 Most Inspiring and Influential Women of 2018. But such recognitions do not drive her.

“I’m driven by trying to make a difference,” especially around the negative narrative many Sri Lankans hold about the ocean, she says. “I want people to fall in love with the ocean … to know the ocean as this incredible space that is life-giving in so many ways.”

Setting its course

For all her love of the deep, de Vos’s earliest memories of the ocean – just a mile from where she grew up in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo – are, unsurprisingly, filled with fear. Like her countrymen, she grew up with repeated warnings that the ocean was “a big beast” to be avoided unless you were a fisherman with little choice but to venture into such unforgiving territory.

“There were often stories of drownings that came with people going overboard,” she says. Most people in Sri Lanka never learn to swim, despite living on an island so picturesque that it is often called the “pearl of the Indian Ocean.”

“People have this disconnect with the sea,” says de Vos. “Life always ended at the shore.”

The few people who learn to swim usually stay in pools. The ocean is not “recreational space,” says de Vos. “I would say it’s a common problem, especially in poorer countries where you don’t have time to waste and there’s nothing to laugh about on the beach.” But her forward-thinking mother sent her to swimming lessons. The young girl jumped into the water so well that she soon began competing in freestyle sprint events.

Her love of the ocean, however, came from a different source: second hand National Geographic the magazines her father brought home from the local bookstore. “It was just the pictures that really got me,” says de Vos.

By the time she turned 17, de Vos had narrowed her career path to marine biology. No local university offered such a course, and she hadn’t heard of any Sri Lankans ever going abroad to study the subject, but that didn’t deter de Vos. Nor did she just miss the required grades for her dream school, the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, which has a strong marine biology program. “I called [the university] and said, ‘Look, I really want to come to your school. I know I’m capable”, she recalls with a laugh.

Her powers of persuasion worked, launching an academic journey that would take her across three continents—including a Ph.D. in Australia and a postdoc in the United States that she completed in 2015.

The journey has not always been smooth sailing. The controversy started when she applied for university. “There is no room in this country for a marine biologist,” people would say. “They couldn’t understand that there could be work, there could be work offshore,” says de Vos. “I always joke now that maybe people thought I was going to go to university and then become a fisherman.

As de Vos progressed in her career, criticism continued, both from within and outside her country. In a personal essay she wrote about New York Timesde Vos points to a handful of fellow scientists from wealthier nations who questioned her authority as a researcher from a poor country, assuming she would “lack the knowledge, the knowledge and the interest to participate in conservation of the sea”.

Meanwhile, fellow Sri Lankans criticized de Vos for not staying within the bounds of a “respectable” woman by engaging in relatively dangerous and intensive outdoor work tasks. A fisherman piloting a boat she was on asked to know what her husband thought about being out on the water and “getting a tan.” De Vos replied that she was not married. The man replied, “I thought so.”

Such criticism only served as fuel for the fire. “I was like, ‘OK, whatever. I’ll tell you,” she said. “In many ways, I’m grateful for the challenges — they really made me who I am. They made me think outside the box. They made me work hard and really dive in in what I do.”

For Clapham, who was one of the Ph.D. Examiners, this is the steely, determined de Vos he knows and loves. “It’s just a force of nature” and it’s just relentless, he says.

Creating a lasting legacy

Today, de Vos continues to study cetaceans through the Sri Lankan Blue Whale Project, which she started in 2008. “We have the longest records of blue whales in this part of the world,” she says, including a photo catalog of hundreds of individuals in the population.

But much about the creatures remains unknown, including their exact numbers and what drives long-term fluctuations in their abundance. During the first five years of the project, de Vos and her team observed multiple sightings of the giants, sometimes between 10 and 12 of the creatures on the move “just blowing everywhere,” she recalls. “But now on the south coast, we don’t see as many blue whales.” She and her team are trying to figure out why and if it’s cause for concern.

But researchers are limited by their ships, which can only support day trips and not longer sea voyages. “We’re looking for such a small piece of ocean,” says de Vos.

In addition to whales, de Vos also observes the biodiversity of their deep-sea environment. She conducted, as far as she knows, the first such audit of the northern Indian Ocean in 2022. “I do these things from a conservation perspective… People are becoming more and more daring about what can be done in these environments of the deep sea,” she says, citing underwater mining as a potential threat. “I work with whales and this is my main love. But whales need a completely healthy ecosystem because they don’t just live in a bubble where everything around them doesn’t bother them.”

A major goal of de Vos’ work is to protect blue whales from ship strikes. Sri Lanka lies along one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, and in a study of 14 stranded whales that had died from ship strikes in 2010–2014, a total of nine, or more than 60 percent, were blue whales.

De Vos brought the danger of shipping to light in 2012. He “started a whole cycle of conversations” with the Sri Lankan government, the International Whaling Commission, the World Shipping Council and other bodies. Those talks culminated in victory in 2022, when the world’s largest container shipping firm, Mediterranean Shipping Company, announced it would reduce the speed of its ships when traveling around the island and adopt a more southern route that avoided the whales. .

Another goal is to make more Sri Lankans appreciate the ocean and the importance of protecting it. “My whole goal is to create love for the ocean and remove fear,” says de Vos, who wants to inspire guardians, or “ocean heroes.” To that end, she gives her time to numerous outreach events, including public talks and monthly science journal clubs. In 2017, she founded the non-profit organization Oceanswell, the first marine conservation research and education organization in Sri Lanka. “For me,” she says, “the educational component is just as important as the research component.”

“She is an extremely engaging and eloquent speaker,” says Clapham. “She’s a lot of fun when she’s doing educational things.” He recalls how de Vos once created animation to explain what blue whales typically eat, bypassing more traditional presentation formats. “It was a lot of fun,” he says.

To help grow Sri Lanka’s nascent marine biology scene, de Vos advises universities on how to teach the subject.

Lasuni Gule Godage is among the first students to pursue a master’s degree in marine science and fisheries at the Ocean University of Sri Lanka, established in 2014 by the Sri Lankan government to promote ocean education. De Vos was instrumental in establishing and obtaining funding for the university’s pioneering program.

De Vos is also a mentor. Gule Godage notes how de Vos advised him on how to carry out field work. “I faced many challenges because there was no postgraduate program [at my school]”, says Gule Godage. “But Dr. Asha was so supportive.”

De Vos doesn’t want others to go through what she did. “My goal is to give everything, whether it’s my knowledge or advice on how to do something better,” she says. “I always tell people when I die, I don’t want everything [I’ve done] to finish.”