50 Years of Protecting Marine Mammals

50 Years of Protecting Marine Mammals

[music]

0:00:01.0 John Kerry: The Marine Mammal Protection Act is critical for the protection and conservation of marine mammals, which are both essential to our marine ecosystem as well...

0:00:11.6 John Sheehan: We're listening to John Kerry, then Senator for Massachusetts, describing the MMPA at a congressional hearing in 1988.

0:00:19.6 JK: The legislation was first enacted in 1972. It responded to a growing public concern at that time over the health and welfare of marine mammals from seals, to whales, to dolphins, to manatees, sea lions, and many more.

0:00:34.9 JS: This is Dive In with NOAA Fisheries. I'm John Sheehan. And today we'll take a look at the landmark legislation 50 years after it was signed into law. We'll hear about how the act has advanced the science of marine mammal health, and how its protections have stopped the decline of many populations and led to the recovery of several, such as populations of humpback whales, gray whales, gray seals, and California sea lions.

0:01:00.2 Teri Rowles: The MMPA as it was written then was really focused on reducing man's impact on marine mammals. And it's the first time that has mandated an ecosystem approach in legislation.

0:01:15.2 JS: This is my guest, Dr. Teri Rowles. The Senior Advisor for Marine Mammal Science with the National Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program in NOAA Fisheries Office of Protected Resources. The program, as we'll hear, was a direct result of the MMPA established in an amendment in 1992. The Act covers all marine mammals. Though it splits responsibilities between government agencies.

0:01:39.6 TR: The Department of Interior, US Fish and Wildlife Service does manatees, dugongs, polar bears, sea otters, and walrus.

0:01:47.3 JS: Whereas, NOAA Fisheries gets species like whales, dolphins, and porpoises.

0:01:51.0 TR: And seals and sea lions. We are developing protocols and procedures, and coming up with management decision, actions. And most of what we manage are human activities because it's hard to tell dolphins not to do something. [chuckle]

0:02:07.2 JS: Dr. Teri Rowles, welcome to Dive In with NOAA Fisheries.

0:02:09.6 TR: It's nice to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

0:02:12.4 JS: So, Teri, what were the human activities that were getting out of control in 1972 that led to the act? What was the need for this to happen?

0:02:22.9 TR: So the needs was the recognition that commercial take or commercial whaling and sealing was having an impact on the population and it wasn't regulated. And then the significant impact bycatch due to fisheries with the tuna-dolphin interactions that were highlighted. I was a student in high school when this legislation was being studied, and I remember the campaign for the tuna-dolphin prohibition, and it was very impactful. It got all of us high school students and college students to talk with our parents to stop buying tuna. So it was extremely powerful at the public level and then also at the legislative level.

0:03:12.8 JS: And I think the ripples of that campaign lasted, because for years and years after, the "Don't eat tuna, it kills dolphins." I remember that when I was a kid.

0:03:23.8 TR: Yeah, yes. It was a very powerful campaign.

0:03:28.2 JS: I'm sure many of you remember, but that messaging was really everywhere. It was a punchline on Seinfeld.

0:03:33.7 Speaker 4: Yeah. Can I take your order?

0:03:35.1 Speaker 5: I'll open with the tuna sandwich?

0:03:38.7 S4: Tuna?

0:03:40.1 S5: Oh, the dolphin thing?

[laughter]

0:03:41.3 S4: They're dying in the nets.

0:03:43.5 S5: Oh.

0:03:43.8 JS: And Lethal Weapon two.

0:03:44.9 Speaker 6: What's that you're eating dad?

0:03:46.9 Speaker 7: I eat my tuna fish sandwich.

0:03:49.1 S?: Tuna?

0:03:49.6 Speaker 8: Daddy you can't eat tuna.

0:03:51.9 JS: And it was part of the reason John Kerry was talking about the MMPA that we heard at the beginning of the episode. And because we're in a way celebrating the Act's 50th anniversary, it's been 50 years since it was passed, this Act has been amended several times. Can you talk about how the Act has evolved over the past few decades?

0:04:13.5 TR: Sure. So probably, the next amendment to the Act after 1972 that was a really significant change was the 1992 Amendment to establish the Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program as a responsibility for both NOAA and US Fish and Wildlife, so it covers all marine mammal species. And the impetus for that was three significant events that happened from 1987-1988. The first is the Exxon Valdez oil spill. And it was significant enough to result in two types of legislation. One was the Oil Pollution Act, 1990 Amendment, and then the amendment to the Marine Mammal Protection Act to the Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program. The second is the 1987-1988 bottlenose dolphin die-off along the Atlantic Coast, that went from New Jersey all the way down to the coast of Florida. There was a surprisingly high amount of persistent organic pollutants found in bottlenose dolphins. And so it raised the concern about the ocean's polluting and killing bottlenose dolphins through chemical exposures.

0:05:32.5 TR: And then the third was a cluster of deaths of humpback whales along New England that were attributed to saxitoxin exposure. A biotoxin that we didn't expect or know at that time. And so from those three things, there was a recognition that the current MMPA did not cover doing critical things that would be needed to respond to and to understand the environmental influences that may be causing marine mammal health problems, and as well as population problems and causing unusual mortality events. In 2000, there was also another amendment, and that was to establish the John H. Prescott Marine Mammal Rescue Assistance Act, which provides grant funding for stranding network partners or marine mammal health partners to respond or investigate further. And so that was recognizing significant contribution that examining live animal strandings and dead animal strandings will play in understanding what's going on and what's causing mortality in marine mammals.

0:06:53.1 JS: And in... So in both of those cases, those were both in response to crises for marine mammal health? And so I'm thinking that it must have driven a lot of understanding, a lot of advancements in marine mammal science.

0:07:08.1 TR: Yeah. So the Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Act is currently really focused on looking at those long-term environmental and marine mammal health issues. And so the Act actually lays out three goals. The first is to collect and disseminate information about marine mammal health and health trends of marine mammal populations in the wild. The second goal is to correlate those health and health trends within physical, chemical and biological environmental parameters. And that's the really, really interesting part and gives the power of looking at as environments change, what impact is that gonna have on health trends including reproduction, survival, mortality, and interactions with new or emerging threats. And then the third piece that these amendments have provided was to develop a coordinated program for responding to unusual mortality events such that we can minimize the impact on animals, we can further understand what's going on and can guide any management actions that need to happen to either protect or to mitigate different causes of mortality.

0:08:27.3 JS: Off the top of your head, can you think of any case studies that illustrate that ecosystem approach?

0:08:34.5 TR: Sure. So early on, after the Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Act was passed, there was a mortality event... A morbidity and mortality event along the west coast of California in which seizuring sea lions were showing up on beaches and then dying either on the beach or in rehabilitation. And it turned out to be a harmful algal bloom biotoxin called domoic acid. It led to a long-term investigation. Looking at the long-term impacts on the developing fetus, on abortions, on survivors like animals that were exposed did survive the initial exposure, which usually results in seizures and then will have long-term impacts and reduce survival overall. A second example was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. And from that study, we recognize the importance of bringing together live animal studies and dead animal studies to really understand what happens. It allowed us to outline pathways for reduction of reproductive success and reduction in survival and then what the impacts were gonna be. We now are better able to respond to oil spills, to collect information to understand the impacts and to provide advice for mitigating impacts or pursuing natural resource damage assessment cases.

[music]

0:10:12.1 JS: Teri says that it's also important when studying a marine mammals environment to be able to do it across international boundaries.

0:10:19.1 TR: There are two examples right now of trans-boundary whale unusual mortality events, which are good examples of how much better it is to follow the migratory path of species across countries. So the first one that I'll talk about is the Gray Whale Mortality Event. And that has spanned from Mexico through four US states and Canada. So we did consistent stranding response, data collection in live and dead animals, pulled the data together, looked at population impacts, both on abundance, body condition and reproduction or calf production. And that has allowed us, together as a team, with our partners in other countries to really begin to understand the environmental influences that are driving that event. The second unusual mortality event that we're working on right now is the North Atlantic right whale. And that spans between the US and Canada. As whales now are expanding their range for feeding up into Canadian waters, then all of our management of that event then occurred across the border.

0:11:36.8 JS: So all of these crises to one degree or another have been affected by, or the result of climate change something that wasn't really top of mind in 1972 when the act was passed. How has climate change factored into a lot of your work?

0:11:51.3 TR: So definitely most recently, it is one of the major factors of our work and it's really putting a lot of pressure on all of the science side of marine mammal studies and ecosystem studies, and also challenging our management actions. Ocean conditions are not the same as they were when the Act was first written. The amendments in 1992 for the Health and Stranding Response Program is important because they also require us to do more environmental monitoring. And that's become really critical. Climate change is accelerating and it affects all marine mammals and marine ecosystems are challenging us a lot. These new challenges really are gonna require innovative science approaches and innovative management strategies and even further develop our partnerships internationally. And all of that has to be done while we work as much as we can to reduce greenhouse gases.

0:12:57.4 TR: I'll give you two examples of stressors that we're seeing right now. The first one is that animals are on the move, and they're moving in geographic areas that we didn't necessarily expect as rapidly as we're seeing them move. And they're moving out of areas in which our regulatory process can protect them, whether it's moving out of marine protected areas or moving out of closure areas for fisheries or seasons for fisheries. And so that challenges our ability to maintain the protection we have for those areas. One example is, the 2014 marine heat wave along the West Coast of the US, which it was fondly called, "The Blob." It changed where marine mammals were feeding and where they were going. So if we have long-term study sets in a certain geographic area for, say, humpback whales, we lost that long-term data stream. That Blob also led to harmful algae blooms. And harmful algae blooms caused fishery closures, then a fishery season was condensed into a geographic area at the same time that whales were using that area and the number of whale entanglements went way up because of that interaction that we hadn't predicted.

0:14:23.3 JS: Yeah. I was hearing parallels between the way that climate change is causing these cascading effects in ecosystems. It's really causing the same sort of cascading effects in those management decisions, because you can't just change one seasonal closure, you have to talk to whoever else that's going to have impact, whether it be the states or fishery councils or anybody.

0:14:47.4 TR: Yes, it is really challenging for all of us. And it's challenging our science, and our science approaches 'cause it's different methods. It's different modeling efforts, you have to consider so many factors. And then that science approach then is informing management decision making, and how do we get that process set in place and then manage... You have to have a really flexible way that they can adapt rapidly to changing areas and changing issues.

0:15:20.8 JS: And so finally, what have been some of the big accomplishments of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in these last 50 years?

0:15:29.0 TR: So probably the first one that I would talk about, there's a prohibition on commercial hunting of marine mammals. In addition, we've been addressing the substantial threat of bycatch due to fishery interactions. And probably the highlight of that early on was addressing the tuna-dolphin interaction. Both from reduced mortality by the interactions, but also reducing the impact due to repeat encirclement of dolphins. Another thing under that reducing bycatch is the current effort along the Atlantic coast under both the ESA and the MMPA to reduce rope in the water to protect North Atlantic right whales. In addition, in coordination with the ESA, we've been able to assist depleted, threatened and endangered marine mammals and allow them to rebound or recover.

0:16:25.5 TR: And probably one of the successful stories is the delisting of Eastern North Pacific gray whales. And recognizing that earlier in the discussion, we talked about the gray whale UME being trans-boundary, and there are still UMEs going on. But what the population has shown us is they can rapidly recover from these episodic events, build the population back up and be able to be resilient to another episodic event. We've also been able to protect important habitats that marine mammals use for feeding and for breeding. And we've advanced, significantly advanced our knowledge about marine mammals health, population, structure, stressors, threats, noise impacts, genetics, understanding what's going on with the populations, looking forward and back, and then a lot more about human impacts, both direct and indirect. And then finally, we've reduced harassment of marine mammals through regulatory and also through non-regulatory mechanisms like partnerships and campaigns and working with industry in a volunteer basis.

[music]

0:17:38.0 JS: Dr. Teri Rowles, thanks so much.

0:17:39.8 TR: Thank you so much.

0:17:42.3 JS: Dr. Teri Rowles is the Senior Advisor for Marine Mammal Science, with the National Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program, and NOAA Fisheries Office of Protected Resources. The MMPA turned 50 in 2022. You can read more about it at fisheries.noaa.gov, where you can also find the latest news about conservation efforts or sign up for one of our newsletters. I'm John Sheehan, and this has been Dive In with NOAA Fisheries.