Experts call for ‘worldwide web’ for endangered whales
Conservationists have called for the creation of a “worldwide web for whales” to protect the giant sea mammals and the ocean regions vital to their survival following a meeting of marine mammal experts in Hawaii.
Erich Hoyt of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society said that less than one percent of the creatures’ habitats had been mapped and that urgent work was required to create new and expanded protected areas to save endangered species from extinction.
“A worldwide effort must be made urgently to identify and define whale and dolphin critical habitats and hot spots,” Hoyt said on the final day of the first international conference on marine protected areas.
“Then we need to map this information with other species and data to create networks of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in national waters and on the high seas. It is like creating a sort of worldwide web for whales and dolphins but connecting not just the animals, but the special places where they live, and the people there too.”
Around 300 MPAs already exist in the world’s oceans. Some are already proving successful; CNN.com reported Friday that efforts to protect the critically endangered right whale along the United States’ Atlantic coastline had resulted in the birth of a record 39 calves this year.
Last week more than 80 right whales – around a quarter of the world’s entire estimated population – were also spotted feeding together off Cape Cod.
But many MPAs are too small to be effective because of whales and dolphins’ extensive range, particularly in Europe, East Asia, West Africa and the Middle East. Just 0.65 percent of the surface of the sea is protected, compared with 12 percent of the world’s land area.
WDCS is calling for 12 large MPAs to be put in place by law by 2012, including Antarctica’s Ross Sea and the Alboran Sea in the western Mediterranean. It urges anyone with an interest in protecting ocean mammal life to sign its petition.
“If we truly want to save whales and dolphins, we have to think about saving their habitat, their homes in the sea. We have recently witnessed the extinction of the Yangtze River dolphin, representing the loss of an entire, ancient family of animals,” said Hoyt.
“If we want to ensure that we don’t suffer a similar loss in the future, we must protect the places and conditions critical to the survival of whales and dolphins and other marine life.”