🚀 go-pugleaf

Biologists say pollution, not hunting, threatens whales most
1998 Agence France-Presse

MONACO (January 22, 1998) commercial whaling, constitutes today's
greatest threat to whales worldwide, according to marine biologists
from nearly 60 countries meeting here this week.

More than 1,000 experts in Monaco for the world's first Marine
Mammal Science Conference said industrial fishing also posed a
threat to marine mammals by infringing on their natural food
supplies.

But record levels of man-made marine pollution was threatening some
species with extinction, they said.

Whaling, once the prime threat to the world's largest mammals, is
no longer a serious concern among scientists monitoring their
numbers and well-being as long as the catch of minke whales remains
at what the International Whaling Commission (IWC) says is a few
hundred whales a year.

"That may be shocking because we're talking about whales, but
whaling today is really not endangering any whale populations
because the catch is relatively small," said Anne Collet, a marine
biologist with the Marine Mammal Research Center in La Rochelle,
France.

"The real problem is pollution, particularly heavy metal
pollution," said Collet, one of the organizers of the conference
here. "The problem is all the more serious and widespread because
marine mammals are at the end of the food chain."

"We are not getting at the causes of pollution today," she said.
"We really don't know how to go about it. We are only beginning to
understand the effects that strong pollution have on marine mammal
organisms."

Two things are clear, she said: pollution diminishes the immune
systems of marine mammals, making them more prone to viral or
bacterial attacks, and it reduces reproduction by preventing
conception or provoking miscarriage.

Under the combined pressure of pollution and whaling, some of the
more fragile species are today on the brink of extinction, as is
the case of the Mediterranean monk seal.

The monk seal's numbers have been reduced to just a few hundred in
the Mediterranean basin bordering Greece, Turkey and Tunisia,
experts say, and there are only a few dozen left in the Atlantic
off Mauritania, where three-quarters of the population has been
wiped out by a mysterious illness.

The European Commission has earmarked funds to protect the dolphin
from the anger of Greek and Turkish fishermen whose nets they have
a vexing habit of fouling and who usually solve the problem with
a rifle.

But at the end of the day no one has yet figured out how to protect
them, because the real enemy of the dolphin, and of most other
endangered sea mammals, is man himself.

Wild species are diminishing in number, while man is omnipresent,
fouling the breeding grounds of sea mammals with pollution,
depleting their food supply through overfishing, and decimating
their numbers with monsterous trawl nets miles wide and deep that
kill everything in their path.

But scientists here also criticize mammal protection groups for
embracing certain endangered species while forgetting about those
on which they depend.

It is pointless to campaign in favor of the media glamorous whales
or seals or dolphins, they say, without protecting the lower
creatures on which they feed.

"If there are no more cod or herring or krill," said Martin Hall
of the InterAmerican Tropical Tuna Commission of La Jolla, Calif.,
"then there will be no more dolphins or whales because they will
have nothing to eat."

By ALLEN NACHEMAN, Agence France-Presse