The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (EFRA) Committee has published the UK Government’s response to its report, Protecting Marine Mammals in the UK and Abroad. The report, published in June, recommended stronger measures to tackle the problem of bycatch by introducing mandatory bycatch monitoring and called on DEFRA to publish an action plan to achieve […]
Marine mammals mistakenly eat plastic debris items such as plastic bags, food wrappers, ropes and abandoned fishing gear, or they become entangled in plastic items including fishing nets. Both scenarios can lead to injury and, in many cases, death. Now a recent US study has revealed that marine mammals face a more subtle plastic threat: microplastics. In the ocean, microplastics […]
Natural Resources Wales (NRW), the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science and Bangor University have placed specialist recording equipment at three locations in the North Anglesey Special Area of Conservation to learn if human made and natural noise affects marine mammals. As part of the Welsh Acoustic Marine Mammal Survey, recordings will be made […]
Mexico has acknowledged that it faces sanctions from the international wildlife body CITES for not doing enough to protect the vaquita marina, a small porpoise that is the world’s most endangered marine mammal. The sanctions have not yet been announced, but they could make it difficult for Mexico to export some regulated animal and plant products like […]
Whales, dolphins and porpoises are a group of marine mammals collectively known as cetaceans. During the 19th and 20th centuries many types due to over-hunting, many cetacean populations had collapsed. A moratorium on commercial hunting of whales was introduced in 1986 by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in late 1986. The IWC was set up […]
It was ‘World Whale Day’ on 20th February and there were several stories which grabbed the headlines. Firstly, from WWF, a ‘world-first map exposes growing dangers along whale superhighways’. A new report from WWF and partners provides the first truly comprehensive look at whale migrations and the threats they face across all oceans, highlighting how […]
The main article was carried in Nature: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep18573 ‘Organochlorine (OC) pesticides and the more persistent polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) have well established does – dependent toxicities to birds, fish and mammals in experimental studies, but the actual impact of OC pollutants on European marine top predators remains unknown. Here we show that several cetacean species have […]