Protecting Whale Migratory Corridors: A Call to Action

Scientists have been yelling at the top of their lungs for decades to get whale migratory corridors protected so that these whales can be protected from their tens of thousands of kilometers of where they travel summers and winters, and make sure that specific areas, special areas are protected where they feed, where they breed, where they rear their

young, and where they need best protection. And now with the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic, it's getting more and more sort of critical to get these corridors protected and to help these whales out. We're going to talk about that on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Let's start the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the

Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you could speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. And I am back from a vacation, a well-deserved vacation, and I'm rested. I'm a little bit more tan. I'm not sure if you can see that. Lots of sun, went up to a cottage with the family and some

friends, and we had a great time, great weather. Love it up in Northern Ontario, sort of Northern Ontario, down near Georgian Bay and Parry Sound. It was a great time, really, really loved it, and look forward to going back next year. So but now that I'm back and rested, I'm relaxed, I've got a new sort of energy about me and I'm ready to give you ocean news. And today's ocean news has to do with

protecting whales and whale corridors. If you don't know what a whale corridor is, is whales will go and they will migrate from one place to another over the year. So for instance, humpback whales will migrate from Hawaii where they go in the winter to Alaska where they go in the summer. so that they can feed and breed and do all the things that they need to do along the

way. And they will feed and go into special areas, I like to call them, and a lot of scientists like to call them distinctive areas, so that they can stop over just while they're going on these corridors. Now, these corridors, they're stressful times. It's a long way to go. It's a lot of body to move through the water. And these animals, these whales, need the protection from other sort of human activities, especially shipping, especially fishing, all these different types of activities that

could cause harm that are human-induced, direct human-induced. So the call has been there for a long time. And I'm gonna take you back in time a little bit. I'm gonna take you back. to the early 2000s when I was a graduate student and I was doing my work on marine protected areas. My supervisor was Dr. John Roth. I almost forgot his name. It's been a long time. My supervisor was Dr. John Roth at Acadia University. He had worked at the University of Guelph for quite a long time. Great guy,

really great supervisor. He, along with John Day from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park at the time, wrote a document for World Wildlife Fund, who is the author of the call now for this new protection of whale blue corridors. John Day and John Roth, they wrote this document that talked about two different types of marine protected areas that we needed. And I've talked about this before, but I'm going to go over it because

if you're new to this podcast, first of all, welcome. And if you're not new, you've heard this before, but you probably want to hear it again because it takes a while to get into people's systems because it's not something we talk about each and every episode. But essentially what you have is you have two types of areas that you like to protect. You have the representative areas and you

have the distinctive areas. Now the representative areas are areas where you'd expect to see, you know, fish, invertebrates like crabs, lobster, octopus, squid, shrimp, those types of things, those types of animals. And then you have, that's where you find it. So you find those representative areas, what you would expect to see in an area. So along the Nova Scotian Shelf and along the Bay of Funny, you're expected to see a certain type of animal. And sometimes you

expect to see assemblages of these animals. So communities of these animals that are getting together, that are dominated by one or two species, and then they have the rest that kind of fall in line. Those things will change every once in a while, those areas, but overall, those areas stay the same. The research that I did when I was a graduate student was looking at macroinvertebrate areas, so like I said, crabs, lobsters, shrimp, squid, octopus,

you know, that type, those types of animals. And then to see over a four-year period, what was the representative areas? How many were there? What was it dominated by? Did they change over those four-year periods? And I'm not going to go into my thesis, but essentially, we had four, sometimes five typified areas. And so those are the ones that we expected to see. Now, you have those types of assemblages. If you do the workup, you

have it for fish, demersal fish, which was done. by somebody previous to me, and then you have all over the country you'll have these types of assemblages and representative areas of what you'd expect to see in particular areas. Now, the distinctive areas is what we're going to talk about today. The distinctive areas are areas that are not normally found. It's kind of like special areas. And they're usually typified by an activity or

something that's special in the area. So it could be a nursery habitat. It could be a breeding ground, spawning area, depending on the species. It could be an upwelling that provides a lot of food for fish, sea turtles, whales, dolphins, seabirds, sharks, tuna, like all these different types of animals that will congregate and aggregate in one area because it's a great stop along their migration period, right, or their migration corridor. See where I'm getting at, how it ties into

this? Now there is an article on www.ca, so the Canadian Wildlife Federation, Foundation, I'm getting the wrestling federation, WWF, which is now WWE, World Wildlife Foundation. And essentially what they did, they came up with this article for a new call for protecting whale migratory corridors, so specially managed areas. These are specific areas that are distinct Because they are these corridors that are necessary for marine mammals, for whales to travel up

or travel down depending on the time of the year. These are really important areas and we've seen these types of corridors protected before. Not necessarily directly, as in like here's where the whales are, but we've actually seen human activities be managed around those areas. So for instance, the North Atlantic right whale distribution area was managed through shipping lanes. So the shipping lanes of the ports that were along those areas where this North Atlantic right whale

would travel and migrate. Those were controls. So they would look at, hey, here are the traditional shipping routes. Here are where the North Atlantic right whales go based on their patterns. And it would be a lot of data. So looking at airborne sort of observations. And there would be autonomous drones and things like that that would actually travel and spot and preserve these types of animals. And

then we would map where they are. So we kind of knew their patterns. And they usually stick to specific patterns because they want to go to these distinctive areas at certain times of the year so that they can feed and rest and recoup and then move along their whale corridor. So the North Atlantic right whale would start off in Jacksonville, Florida, in and around there. And they'd end up sort of north of Maine. And they

would get into Canada. and so forth and so and now the Gulf of St. Lawrence and you know those needed to be protected now there's a lot of shipping that goes along there there's the transatlantic area that gets that there's a lot a ton of shipping and we know the mapping of that through AIS and so we know where these and where these boats go so we can say hey for the time during this time the boats are going to be the shipping lanes are going to be here and that's where we're going to map them

out and you have to follow that so all shipping all any type of shipping vessel that comes through has to go through those areas and so it decreased in noise it decreased in ship strikes and that was the idea the help now We know that migratory corridors can shift based on where the upwellings are, where the special areas are, how the temperature is, how the currents are going. It really

depends on where these animals will go. And so these shipping lanes need to be managed on an annual basis or even semi-annually to make sure that the migratory routes of these ships and these whales do not conflict. And so that was just with one species, an endangered species, or critically endangered species. Now we're talking about, in this article, they're talking about the gray whales as an example, which is the Pacific gray whale population, which

goes from Southern California all the way up to Alaska. In the summers, they'll go up to Alaska to feed on fish. They'll go up there. There's plenty of fish to get. They feed and they stock up on all these fat deposits and things, and then go back down to do their breeding and so forth. And it's a very important population. It's a huge population. But unfortunately, as the Arctic is melting, and there's more shipping that's happening in these areas, this poses a huge

risk for these whales. This is not something that's easy. It's not just gray whales. You get humpback whales as well. There's bowhead whales and beluga whales that are up there. And there are a number of seals and sea lions that are up in the Arctic that can be affected by these ships, that could be affected by the warm water, the lack of sea ice. Now, when you have lack of sea ice, you have lack of plankton. So these baleen whales that are up there looking for plankton, you're not going to

get as much phyto and zooplankton. So there's always there's always a loss of food. There's a loss of production and fish as more and more people are going to be fishing in these areas. There's going to be a loss of fishing in that if it's not managed properly. And let's be honest. this is not that great.

And at the end of a long migration that these gray whales and humpback whales are taking, it's believed to be like one of the primary causes of unusual mortality event declared by the US government between the years of 2018 and 2021 for the gray whales, during which time more than 500 malnourished gray whales washed up along the coast of these blue corridors. The

size of the gray whale population dropped by half from around 28,000 to 14,000. That's a huge huge loss when we're looking at species that are long-lived species. This is these are species where It takes a long time for them to get to the size that they are, to get to reproducing, to get them healthy. And then you have other things

like climate change. You have plastic pollution that can affect them. You have fishing, where they can get entangled by fishing gear like crab pots and lobster pots, as well as nets like gill netting and things like that, long lining. There's a lot of different things that can affect them. And then, of course, there's shipping. And there's noise that throw off their migratory patterns. So many things need to be managed around these whales that are human-induced that we have to

be able to manage those. So these corridors, this call from WWF to manage these corridors is extremely important and of course is the timing can't be more perfect. I mean, the timing would have been perfect. It was done in the early 2000s or even before that when there was a call to do that. But right now it's needed, especially now because, you know, things have just doubled, you know, over the last 10 years in terms of, you know, volumes like shipping volumes and

fishing fleets and things like that. have pushed deeper into Arctic waters. And so, you know, the time is now to recognize migratory corridors as essential components of ocean connectivity and marine species conservation, and to include these in ocean protection measures. Now, the timing of this call is kind of timed to the, there's a new meeting in October 2024, of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention of

Biological Diversity. It'll be the 16th meeting, where this is an internationally recognized convention on biological diversity. It's ratified by a lot of countries, including Canada and the US, as well as other countries around the world. And so there has been sort of this international pressure for these countries to do what's possible to protect these areas. And now when there's that, there's the International High Seas Treaty. There's also the need to protect 30 by 30, so 30% of

land and oceans by 2030. There is a lot of pressure for countries such as Canada and the U.S., especially when we're talking about the Great Whales, to protect their waters, including whale corridors. So not just you know these representative areas where there are some interesting areas or what we expect to see but also not just hydrothermal vents where nobody's really been in that area in the past so it's a little bit of low-hanging fruit.

These corridors are going to be difficult to put in as marine protected areas but they're going to be necessary and they're going to shift As climate change changes everything with wind patterns and currents, migratory corridors are going to change. That means shipping lanes are going to have to change. The fishing fleet is going to have to change over time. And obviously, the way we manage water quality in terms of plastic pollution and nutrients and so forth, that's

going to have to be really managed as well. There are a lot of things that need to be managed, but the big initial thing is let's protect these corridors, whether they be at certain times of the year or they're all year round, something has to be done. And I'll be honest, I

agree with WWF here. I feel like this call, you know, WWF is where I'd worked with, you know, on my, when I did my research on graduate research at a Canadian university, they've been working on the East coast and West coast and Arctic, you know, to get more marine protected areas for decades. And it's something that they've been pushing for a long time into the call for this. you know, during this time when there's going to be a meeting in October is going

to be really important. It's not going to be the last that we hear of this. I'm going to try and get some of the contacts at WWF to come on the show to be able to talk more about this and why the timing now, why October 24th, why the 16th meeting on the conference of the parties to the convention on biological diversity. in October 2024. Why are we going to be worried about this? Obviously, there's going to be other things that are going along in the world. You

know, the US election is going to happen too. But we need countries to really put forth solutions and to act on these protections. And hopefully, these corridors can be a big part of the conversations that go on at the convention. And it's going to be something that we need to talk about. Now, one thing that's interesting, too, in terms of marine protected areas and connectivity, one

of the things that I was going to do in my PhD, I never ended up doing it. I decided to go to just kind of start my life and start all the things that I need to do during my time as

a marine scientist. But one of the things I was going to do is look at connectivity in terms of how these areas, these network of marine protected areas, just similar to the Great Barrier Reef, how we could put that elsewhere and how everything is so unique in different spots and how it would be and how like the politics would work and how the stakeholder engagement work with fisheries and other ocean users as well as protecting habitats and

environments. One of the things I was going to look at was that connectivity between the different areas in a marine protected network. area network. give way to larvae and eggs. And they would go through the currents. And some would go really far. Some wouldn't go that far. Some would go like hundreds of kilometers. Some would go maybe a kilometer. Some would go tens of kilometers. And so we would look at where,

based on models, we would look at where those areas were. And that's how we kind of did our, that was how we were going to do our prediction of where specific areas needed to be in our network. I never ended up going through it, of course other people have and there's been lots of research on that and it's been really cool to

see. Paul Snellgrove is a really big player in that. When I was at Acadia University and I was going to go to Dalhousie to do that, it was quite interesting work and I'm looking forward to catching up and seeing what's happening with that. The ocean

is connected, you know, it's three-dimensional. There's a water column to worry about, there's the depths, there's the surface, and everything in the middle, and it's very difficult to manage, very complex system, and we have to be careful of how we manage it, but one thing we know is we need

to manage it. We need to put more of these sort of legislative tools in place to be able to protect them, especially over international boundaries, especially when we talk about complex migratory corridors that go over boundaries, multiple boundaries, whether they be state, provincial boundaries, or even international boundaries. These are things that we need to talk about. These are things that we need to meet

on. And there are regions like the Gulf of Maine, It has a committee that looks at that on the East Coast of North America. I'm sure they have some on the West Coast and the Salish Seas. And it's really interesting to see how these are managed by each country and how a combination of countries manage these corridors or how they will manage these

corridors or just conservation in general. But I want to kind of just give you an update on that and let you know about these corridors and this call for more protection of these corridors. It's obviously needed, especially now with the melting of the Arctic, for these whales, these gray whales, as well as others. And so something we need to keep an eye on. So I thought I would share that

story with you. I'd love to hear what you think. You can go on Spotify, if you're listening to this on Spotify or watching the video on Spotify, and you can leave a comment. You can also go on YouTube and leave a comment there. This episode will be up there. And of course, if you want to get a hold of me, and you're not on Spotify, you're not on YouTube, and you want to just kind of get in touch with me, you can just hit me up on Instagram, DM me

at HowToProtectTheOcean. Let me know your thoughts on these corridors and the protection and how you would protect them. But I would love to hear from you about these episodes, so don't be shy. Feel free to reach out. I'd love to have a conversation with you, because that's what this episode is all about. It's what this podcast is all about, starting a conversation about the ocean, sharing news, and getting you to listen to news and getting your feedback on it. So thank

you so much for listening to this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time, and