Image Credit: Winky via Flickr
By Emily Persico
British Colombia has come up with a new plan to help save its two orca populations off British Columbia’s southern coast. Unfortunately, though, the plan contains very little concrete measures to achieve its goal.
“It really just commits to developing a plan,” points out the head of the World Wildlife Fund in Canada, David Miller. “It’s not really a plan.”
The whales there currently are suffering from reduced stocks of their favorite food (Chinook salmon), industrial contaminants, and noise pollution from shipping traffic.
“We’ve known for a long time about these problems,” says Miller. “We have to act on the information we have.”
Government folk, however, are of a different mind. For one, scientists aren’t even sure how many whales the area can sustain.
“We’re trying to get a very precise indication if there’s thresholds beyond which the animals can’t effectively forage,” explains John Ford of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. “We don’t know what those thresholds are.”
Scientists are keen to enforce laws that have a specific basis in science and, as scientific knowledge in the area is obviously lacking, the development of regulations will have to wait.
Nature does not wait. The northern population of orcas is threatened but swimming forward, with encouraging gains in recent years. On the contrary, the southern population is down to just 71 whales, earning it the highest risk classification in Canada: Endangered.
“The population is small enough now that they need every individual they can keep hold of,” says Ford.
Even under the best of conditions, it will take no less than a quarter century for the southern population to recover due to low reproduction rates. Some regulations have been put in place to begin the recovery process, but Miller suggests that the Canadian government needs to consider closing fisheries, cutting noise, reducing industrial pollution, and rerouting shipping routes.
“Just because we need more science doesn’t mean we shouldn’t act,” concludes Miller.