Tag: whaleofasummer

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conservation biology marine mammals ocean

Dolphin Research Australia

Dolphin Research Australia - Isabela Keski-Franti and Liz Hawkins

Every little step, every little change that you make is huge.

Dolphin Research Australia's Liz Hawkins and Isabella Keski-Franti [ 58:10 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In the last of the Sustainable Lens #whaleofasummer series we are joined by Dolphin Research Australia‘s Dr Liz Hawkins and Isabella Keski-Franti. They talk about research, education and Indigenous Management Frameworks

As well as academic performance, students have to have character strength, they have to have a feeling of citizenship – they have to belong.

Students have to remember that they belong in the ecosystem.

Children are very curious, they want to know what is around them, it’s a matter of providing them with opportunities

One of our traditions is to give something back to our host, so how can we show gratitude and respect for nature and place?

(On kids fund raising to adopt a dolphin) It’s the interconnectedness of everything, that makes them understand the importance of saving an animal, that even though they don’t have a direct connection but they are doing something – this is empowering them in becoming a citizen – an active citizen in their community.

If you want to live in the dolphin’s world you would need to lose your eyes

Everybody can make the changes, everybody has a right to be different

There is a role for all of us – if you do what your character strength is

Making the change through connecting with children – helping them shift the status quo of our society.

To talk about an inter-generational future, we need to connect with our children and help them make connections with their ecosystem – this is activism. We need to be part of the ecosystems and working together.

We create our world, our reality, dependent on the changes we make.

(Isabela on challenges for the future) I find myself in a really good place. I am really doing what I love – what I feel connected with. I am an optimistic person. I live every day at a time. I have hope for the future, and I think my work with children helps a lot. And I’m working with people who are passionate about it. This helps a lot, and I’m blessed to be working with people that have great integrity, ethics and works as a team. So I can’t see challenge right now. Life is exciting.

(liz on challenges for the future). It’s always challenging keeping an NGO afloat – making science sexy to attract and attracting community support.

Every little step, every little change that you make is huge. So don’t feel overwhelmed by the news or what is happening around you. Focus on every little change that you make on a daily basis.

(Am I an activist?). I don’t like labels to be honest because I think they limit us. I like to think of myself as…everybody can make the changes, bit everybody has a right to be different. You don’t have to either be one thing or another. There is a place for everybody.
(I was very busy designing our dolphin education programme and someone asked me to a protest about oil seam coal mining)…I would like to be there, but I didn’t find it in me to be there because I was so excited about designing our programme, my insight was I didn’t have to be there – there is a place for everybody. We need the role of all of us – we do what our character strength is.
If I am making the change through connecting with children, helping them shift the status quo of our society – the focus inter-generationally speaking, for the families and our future – I see this as an activism. If others want to be more actively participating in manifests…I think that’s perfect we need all these ecosystems working together,

This is the last in the Sustainable Lens #whaleofasummer series recorded during the Biennial Conference of the Marine Mammals Society.

Categories
conservation biology marine mammals ocean

Whale rights

Philippa Brakes

What are those things that qualify human beings as having rights? What are the things that qualify an entity as a person? It’s extraordinary, a corporation can be a person and can have rights, and yet there are lots of species that might be able to suffer quite extensively but yet don’t yet have rights.

Philippa Brakes [ 30:43 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Philippa Brakes works with Whale and Dolphin Conservation (whales.org) where she leads the ethics programme. She is the co-author of Whales and Dolphins: Cognition, Culture, Conservation and Human Perceptions.

She talks with us about the role of the WDC in advocacy. We talk charismatic megafauna, personhood and the declaration of rights for cetaceans. She says that scientific whaling isn’t. And what is being done about. And we talk about the challenge of marine renewable energy installations.

Very much like us: long lived, slow reproducing mammals that just happen to live in the sea. They have complex social groups…but they’re very different to us too. Their world is usually one of sound, whereas ours is predominantly one of sight.

As an eleven year old we visited a zoo in Thailand and saw an elephant in chains…..and I went on and on about it…eventually my father said, “If you feel so strongly about it, why don’t you write to the King of Thailand” so I did. And that was the beginning of my career of feeling that I needed to represent those who don’t have a voice.

While I’m massively concerned about the conservation and sustainability implications of some of the things that are going on in the modern age, I’m also very concerned about the welfare of some of the individuals.

Individual behaviours have population level effects…but it is not really taken into consideration in conservation models. For socially complex mammals the individual is going to be really important in the future.

The spatial scales of other species who can transmit and communicate with each other across ocean basins…we can’t help but consider things from our own perspective. If you could talk to your friend who was 10, 15, 20 kilometers away, that makes your sense of scale quite different.

Whales and dolphins are not well adapted to life in captivity

If we focus on populations, knowledge rather than genes becomes the currency if it’s influencing fitness

Things are going in the right direction with whaling, but there’s still a lot more to do. They’re quite diminished from 150 years ago, so we need to be looking at protecting their environments better rather than looking at how many we can sustainably remove from populations.

(On a Minke whale from the area targetted by Japan’s whalers being found near Australia’s Great Barrier Reef) It’s important that we don’t get into the game of saying “they’re our whales..no they’re our whales we can do with them what we like”. The whales are their own entity, they should be allowed to go about their business unharassed.

The scientific evidence is such that it can be argued that some whale and dolphin species qualify on the basis of personhood.

We rightly have rights for my 4 year old daughter, yet we wouldn’t say here decision making is at the level of qualifying her as upstanding member of our society yet…just because an individual is granted rights doesn’t mean that they have associated responsibility. This comes up as a confusion ‘does that mean that Orcas shouldn’t hunt Hector’s dolphins?’.

Personhood is a legal term based on certain traits – communication, cognition, meta-cognition, all of those aspects – no-one wants to call them people.

The legal recognition qualifies them to not suffer psychologically, or physical trauma for any extended period. The right not to be subject to abuses.

(Am I an activist?). I wouldn’t call myself an activist, I’m an advocate. I’m a scientist who also works in the policy end of the debate.

This is the sixth in the Sustainable Lens #whaleofasummer series recorded during the Biennial Conference of the Marine Mammals Society.

Categories
conservation biology marine mammals ocean

Saving whale habitats

Sarah Courbis

Not so much about saving the animal as the ecosystem where they live – habitat destruction is the biggest threat to almost every animal on the planet

Sarah Courbis [ 56:12 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dr Sarah Courbis is a Research Associate at Portland State University, specialising in whales and mammals in Hawaii.

This is the fifth in the Sustainable Lens #whaleofasummer series recorded during the Biennial Conference of the Marine Mammals Society. Sarah’s attendance at the conference was provided by the Conservation Council of Hawaii and Honua (Hoe-New-ah) Consulting.

We don’t need to anthropomorphise to make them interesting

They are really amazing social animals with lots of cool behaviours and intricate relationships

(Am I an activist?). I wouldn’t say that. I do have opinions. But as a scientist it is really important for me to go into a situation and do my research without having a desired outcome – I just want to see what’s true. Whether or not that supports my opinion, maybe I’ll need to change my opinion. I don’t think activist is a good way to describe my approach to things, but I would say I am an environmentalist, and I do think that it is important that we do understand and take care of our environment – and I’m hoping to do my little part to help that.

Categories
conservation biology marine mammals ocean

Dolphins:communities

Tara Whitty

Tara Whitty [ 1:03:09 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I don’t come in saying “hi guys, I know you’re struggling to survive, let’s save the dolphins”.

For me it has become as much about understanding and helping these communities as it is about helping the animals.

Tara Whitty describes herself as an aspiring ecologist, conservationist, do-gooder and wanderer. She is also a PhD student at the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Tara has developed an interdisciplinary approach, “mapping conservation-scapes,” synthesizing methods from ecology and social sciences. Conservation-scapes are the set of factors composing a conservation situation, encompassing: how human activity overlaps with and impacts organisms; sociocultural and economic drivers of human activity; and governance structure and potential for management. Tara is applying these conservation-scapes to developing an understanding of Irrawaddy dolphins in Malampaya Sound (The Philippines) and Guimaras Strait, Philippines; Trat coastline, Thailand; Mahakam River, Indonesia.

Talking points:

The over-arching issue is how do we look at fisheries management in a way that might contribute to dolphin conservation.

Socio-ecological systems: Systems that involve links an interactions between complex human systems and complex natural systems

I hesitate to distinguish between human systems and ecosystems. Ecosystem based management explicitly states that humans are part of ecosystems.

I’d like to see an set of social-environmental metrics…so we can rate sites based on social cohesion, community engagement, strength of enforcement…develop sets of profiles.

We can learn from areas such as public-health, they’ve had a long history of balancing collecting information and taking action.

The dolphins are not doing OK, they are being caught as by-catch at an unsustainable rate

Sometimes I would forget I was working on dolphins, because I was looking at very entangled issues of fisheries management, and those will take a long time to fix. Even if it doesn’t save the dolphins, it’s worthwhile doing it but you’re going to hopefully improve the ecosystem as a whole, including to improve human livelihoods. But realistically speaking I don’t think it is going to happen in time for these dolphins unless some serious triage efforts happen quickly.

Tara Whitty was in Dunedin as as part of the Biennial Conference of the Marine Mammals Society. Her talk was titled “Mapping conservation-scapes of Irrawaddy dolphins (Orcaella brevirostris) and small-scale fisheries in Southeast Asia: An interdisciplinary approach”.

After we recorded this session, Tara was awarded the J. Stephen Leatherwood Memorial Award for the most outstanding student presentation on marine mammals of South and Southeast Asia, with particular emphasis on conservation. Congratulations Tara.

This is the fourth in the Sustainable Lens #whaleofasummer series recorded during the Biennial Conference of the Marine Mammals Society.

Categories
conservation biology marine mammals ocean

Whaley wicked problems

Andy Read

Andy Read [ 53:20 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Inaction is failure

Andy Read describes wicked problems as the basis of the situation of much of marine mammal conservation globally. But, he says, the wickedness of problems is no excuse for standing by while species go extinct.

Dr Andy Read is the Stephen Toth Professor of Marine Biology at the Duke University Marine Laboratory, in Beaufort, NC, USA. He is interested in the life history and population dynamics of threatened and endangered species, the application of spatial analysis to marine ecosystems, the intersection of oceanography and foraging ecology and the development of new approaches to conservation.

Trying to understand patterns and processes in an environment you can’t see…this mysterious world that exists in three dimensions. I found that fascinating, and still do.

Climate change is felt most keenly at the poles, we can work there to understand over shorter time periods ecological changes…as a signal of what’s coming in other places, we should be very concerned.

Wicked problems are complex, difficult to characterise, you don’t know how to intervene and if you do you don’t know if you’ve been successful or not – we have lots of those.

Tricky conservation problems keep you up at night – how to balance the needs of social justice and feeding 60 million desperately poor, with the ecological needs of 80 dolphins who are the last of their species.

Truly wicked problems are ones that don’t have answers, if they did they wouldn’t be wicked.

There are no technology solutions to wicked problems

So we’re concerned about the viability of the Mekong river dolphins, but if you think about the problem we need to solve, it’s food security for 60 million desperately poor people living alongside the river.

(We look for) strategies that benefit human communities and are as least damaging as possible to the environment

There are no solutions, just good or bad bad options

The conservation community was afraid of action, and we lost an entirely family of mammals (the baiji or Chinese river dolphin)

The more each of us thinks about how each of our actions impacts the sustaining systems, the better off we’ll be. We have to do this all the time, and it’s a challenge as we’ve evolved to be deliberately not good at making connections.

There is something innate about being human that we appreciate the complexity of the natural world – when we simplify it as a result of careless inactions it becomes a less beautiful place.

Conservation is a normative discipline, we believe that the loss of biodiversity is a bad thing. We should do everything we can to minimise that loss of biodiversity caused by human activity and to restore it where we can. In way, yes I’m an activist, but I feel all people working in conservation are activists – it’s a normative discipline and we accept that part of our science.

Dr Read was in Dunedin as a Plenary Speaker at the Biennial Conference of the Marine Mammals Society. His plenary talk was titled “Conservation of marine mammals in the twenty-first century: challenges and opportunities”

This is the third in the Sustainable Lens #whaleofasummer series recorded during the conference.

Categories
conservation biology marine mammals

Ocean noise

Jay Barlow

Jay Barlow [ 57:39 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Whaling is not the biggest threat to the marine mammals of the world, it’s fishing, it’s climate change, it’s ocean noise. I’d like to see the concern that was generated in the 60s and 70s to stop whaling which was largely successful, applied to other areas. Stopping harmful fishing practices, stopping needless propagation of sound from our shipping vessels. This story is harder to tell, but to be effective stories have to be personal.

You can take a person and play them a recording of what the ocean should sound like, and then play them a recording of what it sounds like now. We don’t really have any sense of how much human caused noise there is in the ocean. That noise never leaves the ocean.

If our national parks were as noisy as our national marine sanctuaries are underwater, people would never stand for it.

Dr Jay Barlow is a research scientist within the NOAA’s Protected Resources Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Centre. He is the leader of the EEZ Marine Mammals and Acoustics Programme within the Protected Resources Division and is an Adjunct Professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

I’m not an activist. There are a lot of pathways to being scientists, advocates and fundraisers. Every marine mammal scientist has to be a bit of a fund-raiser. I shy away from the role of a pure advocate because it is really difficult to keep your scientific credibility if you appear too passionate, and let your passions outrun your academic approach to the science. But on the other hand, my passions drive what science I do.

This is the second in the Sustainable Lens #whaleofasummer series recorded during the Biennial Conference of the Marine Mammals Society.

Categories
conservation biology marine mammals ocean

Succeeding at marine mammal conservation

Barbara Taylor

Barbara Taylor [ 55:29 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Threats are now largely invisible, it’s no longer the graphic carnage…now it’s more indirect but no less a threat to the species.

NOAA’s Dr Barbara Taylor argues that we need a new approach to marine mammal conservation. Principal current and near-future conservation challenges include direct human-caused mortality (via fisheries by-catch in small-scale fisheries and hunting) and an indirect reduction in population growth due to habitat degradation from over-fishing, environmental contamination, and global climate disruption.

Dr Taylor was in Dunedin as a Plenary Speaker at the Biennial Conference of the Marine Mammals Society. Her plenary talk was titled “All the ingredients—how to succeed at marine mammal conservation”.

This is the first in the Sustainable Lens #whaleofasummer series recorded during the Biennial Conference of the Marine Mammals Society.