Marine Protected Areas woefully inadequate for whales and dolphins

Humpback breaching. Credit Scot Portelli.

April 2009. The creation of a worldwide web, or network, of protected areas is urgently needed for the protection of whales, dolphins and the places important to their survival according to marine experts.

The call from WDCS, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society comes after the first international conference on marine mammal protected areas, in Hawaii, and is one of several important recommendations agreed by conference delegates.

WDCS Research Fellow, Erich Hoyt, said: "A worldwide effort must be made urgently to identify and define whale and dolphin critical habitats and hot spots. 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."

Marine Protected Areas network
While humpback whales cavorted offshore in their mating grounds, over 200 marine mammal scientists, MPA managers and other experts from 40 countries gathered at the conference to address future challenges for the management of existing and the establishment of new marine protected area networks.

"Probably less than 1 percent of the world's marine mammal critical habitat has been identified much less protected," added Hoyt. "We have discussed strategies for cost-effective measures to attack this huge workload with surveys and other studies. Clearly the emphasis will need to be on rare and endangered species, but we also need to protect healthy populations so that they don't join the endangered ranks."

Marine Protected Areas too small and ineffective
Approximately 40% of the 300 existing marine mammal MPAs are too small to offer the protection required for these wide ranging mammals and even a higher percentage offer no real protection. MPAs in Europe, East Asia, West Africa and the Middle East are particularly small and ineffective for protecting coastal dolphin habitat, and even less for the wider-ranging large whale species.