2007: Help at last for Dolphins?

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has declared 2007 the Year of the Dolphin. Patron of the educational campaign is Prince Albert II of Monaco, and TUI, Europe’s leading travel group, will be lending its support. Governments, the private sector and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are being asked to become involved in the campaign which is under the auspices of UNEP’s “Convention on Migratory Species” (CMS) www.yod2007.org.

Dolphins, like all whales, are urgently in need of protection. The majority of the more than 70 species of dolphin, harbour porpoises and small whales are having huge problems with anthropogenic influences and are endangered, or even in danger of extinction, like the harbour porpoise in the Baltic Sea. The biggest man-made problems are caused by the fishing industry’s remorseless overfishing of feeding grounds, and by fatalities in “incidental” by-catch, where these lung-breathing marine mammals become entangled and die a slow and painful death through suffocation in nets set for other purposes.

According to projections by scientists as far back as 2002, at least 300,000 small and large whales die each year as by-catch. Add to this a similar number of seals and the death toll from by-catch reaches at least 650,000 marine mammals (www.gsm-ev.de). A further threat is posed by pollution, whether it’s noise pollution ranging from damaging to deadly, or through chemicals and waste materials. Greenpeace estimates that plastic waste kills more than a million animals each year in our seas.

In the Mediterranean, a team from “Green Ocean” determined an average distance of 80 metres between one piece of plastic and the next on the sea’s surface. At the University Clinic in Pisa, a clump of plastic materials weighing almost three kilos and a bottle were discovered in the stomach of a dolphin during a post mortem examination.

Even deliberate hunting is still carried out in several countries. In Japan and on the Danish Faroe Islands for example, small whales and dolphins are still being directly targeted and killed.

One of the aims of the Year of the Dolphin campaign, which is supported by the specialised agreements ASCOBANS (for small whales in the North and Baltic Seas) and ACCOBAMS (for whales in the Mediterranean and Black Seas), is to raise people’s awareness of the necessity of protection for dolphins and other small whales. In our western world at least, it is hard to imagine that anyone would want even one dolphin or harbour porpoise to die because of human intervention. The German Ministry for the Environment will be supporting the campaign with an international conference to be held on the German North Sea coast in the early autumn. The subject will be marine protected areas.

The Convention on Migratory Species which was founded in 1979 is based in Bonn and in 2006 already has 90 member states.
Petra Deimer, GSM