United States: Marine Mammal Protection Act

ABSTRACT Providing rapid and humane care for distressed or threatened marine mammals is crucial to the ultimate success of such actions. Recently, in the southeast United States, marine mammals were observed in the vicinity of several oil spills. Proper coordination of marine mammal rescue or recovery actions with the Unified Command (UC) is essential for response personnel safety and increased probability of saving the affected animals. In the event of animal mortalities, effective coordination between the marine mammal resource agencies and the UC helps ensure the preservation of causal evidence. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration'S (NOAA'S) Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R), generally through the NOAA Scientific Support Coordinator (SSC), is able to assist the Federal On-Scene Coordinator (FOSC) and UC in addressing the threat of spilled oil on potentially affected marine mammals. Response actions during recent spills included: documenting the animals’ type and location, notification of the marine mammal agencies and teams responsible for their recovery and care, and coordination between the spill response and the marine mammal response. The actions of responders during recent spills involving marine mammals are summarized and relevant issues discussed, including properly characterizing the threat to marine mammals from spilled oil. The recent oil spill responses involving marine mammals in the southeastern U.S. are applicable to future spills throughout the United States and potentially worldwide. These recent incidents underscore the need to fully understand and plan for high profile wildlife issues during oil spill responses.

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Encountering whales: How encounter rates became the basis for managing whaling

NAMMCO Scientific Publications ◽

10.7557/3.2715 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 7 ◽

pp. 221 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Tim D Smith

Keyword(s):

North Atlantic ◽

Marine Mammal ◽

Quantitative Methods ◽

Scientific Committee ◽

Rate Data ◽

Encounter Rates ◽

The North ◽

The North Atlantic ◽

Marine Mammal Protection Act ◽

Management Advice

Declining rates of encountering whales, including both sighting and catching, were noted by whalers throughout the 19th century, and these declines became the first indication that whaling was adversely affecting whale abundance. The interpretation of declines in both sighting and catch rates proved to be a difficult scientific task. Satisfactory quantitative methods of interpreting changes in whale encounter rates were not developed until the second half of the 20th century. Rates of encountering whales played a key role in the International Whaling Commission (IWC) Scientific Committee from its beginning in the early 1950s, as well as in the US in implementing its Marine Mammal Protection Act beginning in the early 1970s. The development of methods of collecting and interpreting sighting and catch data was intimately interwoven with the development of themanagement of whaling and cetacean by-catches in fisheries throughout the world, but especially within the context of the Scientific Committees of the IWC and the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission (NAMMCO). Although overfishing of whales was initially identified through the use of sighting rate data, catch rate data provided the IWC’s Committee its first firm footing for management advice. However, it was sighting rate data that ultimately became the basis for the scientific advice on whaling and for management advice in other settings. This led to the development of large scale cetacean sighting programmes, such as the IWC’s International Decade of Cetacean Researchsurveys in Antarctic aboard Japanese ships, the North Atlantic Sighting Surveys (NASS) aboard Norwegian, Icelandic, Spanish, Greenlandic and Faroese vessels and aircraft (coordinated by NAMMCO through its Scientific Committee from 1995), and surveys under the US’s Marine Mammal Protection Act and the European Union’s Small Cetacean Abundance in the North Sea (SCANS) programme. Fishery independent cetacean sighting surveys have proven to be both central and essential to understanding and regulating of human impacts on cetaceans.

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