Protecting the favorite spots for whales in the Pacific
Protecting the favorite spots for whales in the Pacific
Wednesday, 26 April 2017
Have you ever wondered why whales and dolphins go to certain parts of the ocean to hunt for food, breed and raise their young? What is special about these places across the Pacific that make them so desirable to whales and dolphins so that they return year after year?
In late March 2017, 23 scientists and experts from 14 countries met at the SPREP office in Apia, Samoa, to determine where these “Important Marine Mammal Areas”, or IMMAs, are located in the South Pacific region. I was lucky to be there as co-chair of the workshop, representing Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) and the IUCN Marine Mammal Protected Areas Task Force, which I also co-chair.
After a week of hard work, the group elaborated some 29 candidate IMMAs (cIMMAs) and 16 Areas of Interest (AoI) across the vast Pacific. The cIMMAs will now go to an independent panel for consideration before, at least some of them, becoming full IMMAs. The process is expected to take 3-6 months.
Determining where the important areas are is the first step toward protecting them, keeping the waters clean, fish stocks healthy, becoming aware of the risks to marine mammals such as getting hit by ships and acute noise in the oceans such as from Navy sonar and seismic tests.
Whales, dolphins and other marine mammals are the most visible indicators we have of the health of the oceans because they come to the surface to breathe. If they regularly feed, socialize and/or raise their calves in an area, it can be a way of monitoring the ocean and to determine its health. For this reason, whales and dolphins will be valuable for monitoring climate change in future.
The IMMA Regional Workshop is only the second one in the world (the first was October 2016 in the Mediterranean). From 2018 to 2021 there will be four further workshops across the Indian Ocean and the Southeast Pacific. The IMMA programme will also result in implementation of conservation measures for representative areas in several of the regions. To read more news about this long-term mapping and conservation project, go to the Task Force website.
The workshop was organized by the IUCN Marine Mammal Protected Areas Task Force as part of the GOBI-IKI German-government funded climate change initiative. The workshop was hosted by the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP).
After the workshop, five of us in the group travelled to Tonga to present our results and participate in workshops at the “Whales in a Changing Ocean” conference, part of the Year of the Whale celebrations in the South Pacific. At this conference, Pacific Island nations got together and signed a declaration for conservation of whales and the ocean and pledged to work on a five-year plan to achieve conservation goals. Tonga also announced a national whale sanctuary.
— © Erich Hoyt 2017