Sea Mammals Find U.S. Safe Harbor
http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/?Page=news&storyID=15843&category=uvmhome[font face=Serif][font size=5]Sea Mammals Find U.S. Safe Harbor[/font]
04-10-2013
By Joshua E. Brown
[font size=3]In 1972, a U.S. Senate committee reported, Many of the great whales which once populated the oceans have now dwindled to the edge of extinction, due to commercial hunting. The committee also worried about how tuna fishing was accidentally killing thousands of dolphins, trapped in fishing gear. And they considered reports about seal hunting and the decline of other mammals, including sea otters and walruses.
In October of that year, Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
Four decades later, new research shows that the law is working.
Not only has the act successfully prevented the extirpation of any marine mammal population in the United States in the forty years since it was enacted, write UVM conservation biologist Joe Roman and his colleagues in a new report, but also, the current status of many marine mammal populations is considerably better than in 1972.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12040