Protect marine mammals from industrialisation

Claire Hamlett

Claire is a freelance writer and energy campaigner based in Oxford. She is interested in writing about how to make more room for wildlife in human-dominated places, natural climate solutions, and animal minds. Follow her on Twitter @HamlettClaire.

When a solitary beluga whale turned up in the Thames in 2018, he quickly became a local celebrity. People flocked to the river’s banks to catch a glimpse of the animal, affectionately dubbed ‘Benny’, and a brewery named a beer after him.

Benny’s presence in London’s waters led to the cancellation of local Bonfire Night fireworks and ships having to travel more slowly or alter their journeys in order to keep him safe from harm. It’s not hard to see why this one whale elicited such a protective response from the public and from authorities. Being a lone stranger far from home and hanging out for months in a place where he was visible to many people (if sometimes hard to spot), made it easy to be captivated by and become attached to him. But out at sea where marine mammals like whales and dolphins are mostly unseen by the public, disturbances like shipping traffic and loud noises from underwater construction are not restricted just because there are some Bennys about.

Now, conservationists are calling for more robust UK policy and legislation to ensure impacts from human activity on the welfare of whales and dolphins as individuals are properly addressed and mitigated. Whale and Dolphin Conservation UK (WDC) recently hosted a workshop with animal welfare experts on this issue, and produced an expert statement as guidance for policymakers, conservationists, governments and industry.

Beluga whale / Tengyart on Unsplash

But as pressures on the oceans mount from increasing industrialisation, safeguarding whale and dolphin welfare will become an increasing challenge. It will also be more crucial than ever.

Why welfare matters

Animal welfare has not been well-integrated into wildlife conservation, in science nor in policy making. Welfare concerns have mainly been focused on terrestrial farmed animals – pigs, cows, chickens. ‘We’ve had that motivation of wanting to know where our food comes from,’ says Sarah Dolman, Senior Policy Manager at Whale and Dolphin Conservation UK (WDC). ‘With wild animals, and those in particular that live in the marine environment where we can’t see them, it’s not like with meat in the supermarket where we are faced with those decisions about welfare all the time.’

Wildlife conservation has typically focused on impacts at the level of species population or sometimes ecosystem. Regulations for industries impacting whales and dolphins have therefore often equated sustainability with not having a significant impact on the size of a population. Some researchers have argued that this implies ‘no management action is required if the number of individuals affected is less than some agreed criteria’ for ‘sustainable’ loss of life ‘regardless of the level of suffering experienced by individual animals’. Regulations with a stronger emphasis on welfare would better reflect the intelligence and social and emotional capacities of whales and dolphins that makes it so important to ensure the well-being of individual animals.

Meanwhile, the oceans are getting busier and noisier. In the last fifty years, offshore resources have been increasingly developed as onshore resources dwindle, in what has been dubbed the ‘Blue Acceleration’ by PhD student Jean-Baptiste Jouffray and his co-authors from Stockholm University in a recently published paper. This proliferation of industrial activity and claims on more and more ocean space and resources by different industries and countries poses a huge challenge for policymakers and conservationists.

From the perspective of protecting whales and dolphins, the challenge will be not only to put greater emphasis on welfare, but to implement effective policy measures for doing so across multiple, disparate industries and legal jurisdictions.

‘If we think about animal welfare, we have to think about all the experiences the animal has in its daily life, and how human activities contribute to those,’ says Dolman. Whales and dolphins may spend their days hunting or foraging for food, socialising (a vocal as well as a physical activity), sleeping, exploring and travelling, or mating. Human activity can cause pain, suffering, or disturbance to individual animals that can have effects either in the short-term or across time and can ripple out beyond the individual animal to affect other individuals and even whole social groups.

One striking example of how individuals can be affected by what happens to another animal is the killer whale who carried her dead new-born calf around for 17 days in an apparent display of grief.

Killer whales / Bart van Meele on Unsplash

Dr. Lori Marino, a neuroscientist with expertise in animal minds, notes that the advanced intelligence and emotional capacity of whales and dolphins, like humans, makes them ‘vulnerable to emotional and social stresses that can lead to considerable harm.’ Disturbance and injury thus may not be temporary, but can have longer-term and more complex repercussions, impacting physical and mental health, social learning, reproductive behaviour, and social and familial interactions. ‘This important point is critical for guiding the ethics of how we interact with and treat cetaceans,’ Marino says.

Properly accounting for individual welfare can actually be beneficial to conservation at the population level. As Dolman wrote in a recent blog post, welfare ‘may also be an indicator of potential threats to social units, or populations. These population-level effects may take a long time to manifest or to be measured, if at all.’ Once conservationists start seeing problems at the population level, it means that they have a much tougher job to undo the damage than if problems are spotted immediately through assessing and addressing welfare impacts. And taking action sooner would of course save individual whales and dolphins from considerable amounts of suffering.

The Blue Acceleration

The industries which are spreading with increasing speed throughout the oceans are numerous and varied. Shipping and cruise tourism, deep sea mining for minerals, offshore energy such as wind farms and hydropower, aquaculture including fish farms and trawl fishing, the laying of fibre optic cables, desalination plants, and building pipelines to support offshore oil and gas development. Some of these industries are already known to impact whales and dolphins as well as many other marine animals and ecosystems. Fishing with nets, for instance, results in huge numbers of marine mammals being caught as ‘bycatch’; the US Commission on Ocean Policy has described bycatch as ‘the biggest threat to marine mammals worldwide.’ Yet the real numbers of animals bycaught are often underestimated, since bycatch is poorly monitored and reported.

But death isn’t the only outcome for an animal that is bycaught. Sarah Dolman co-authored a paper detailing the welfare impacts inflicted on animals that survive bycatch. There is a ‘wide range of recorded injuries, including abrasions, cuts, bruising, and broken bones, along with the potential for panic associated with forced submersion,’ she writes. Nonetheless, the impact of bycatch is generally measured at the population level, and these serious and widespread welfare issues do not get accounted for when fisheries are assessed for ‘sustainability’.

Offshore energy is an industry known to cause disturbances below the ocean surface. Seismic surveys undertaken for purposes such as locating oil and gas deposits in the sea floor are very loud, with the sound travelling for thousands of miles through the water. Noise pollution is a problem for renewable energy too: foundation structures for offshore wind turbines are installed using ‘impact pile driving’, which is an intensively noisy underwater activity, and can cause problems for marine mammals including hearing damage, stress and avoidance of sites. Right now, the world’s largest wind farm is being built in the North Sea off the Yorkshire coast – in the same region where dolphins and minke, humpback, and sperm whales have been becoming more common.

While the noise impacts of pile driving were predicted early on, that isn’t the case for all ocean industries. In fact, part of the problem of the Blue Acceleration, according to Jouffray and his co-authors, is that for a newer industry like deep sea mining, environmental impacts are not being properly assessed before exploitation and extractive operations begin. If even the standard environmental impacts assessments are not being properly carried out before licenses for mining and other activities are granted, then what chance is there that these industries will be worrying about the well-being of individual animals?

Mitigating impacts

Rampion offshore windfarm, UK / Nicholas Doherty on Unsplash

It could be argued that some of these problems could be mitigated simply by curbing industrial expansion. Further exploitation of oil and gas resources is, after all, only going to keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that the climate can no longer afford. But building out offshore wind capacity, for instance, is necessary to help many countries move away from a fossil fuel economy. And as long as an industry is operating, even if they ought to be halted like oil and gas, they should still strive to minimise impacts on whale and dolphin welfare. The way Dolman describes WDC’s response to the whaling industry is a good illustration of this. ‘Our aim [at WDC] is to end whaling,’ she says, ‘but we’re still concerned about how whaling happens, e.g. time to death for the animal. We’d be naïve if we weren’t engaged in issues around improving welfare as long as whaling continues.’

How you try to lessen impacts matters too. The UK government currently requires some fishing vessels to use acoustic deterrent devices (ADDs) to scare animals away and lower the risk of bycatch, and these devices are commonly used on fish farms in Scotland as a non-lethal means of keeping away marine animals including seals. In reality, the unregulated use of these devices is adding to underwater noise pollution, and can cause hearing damage and stress to animals. There are other ways to lessen the impacts on marine animals from fishing, for example by restricting or even banning fishing, in some cases, in places where whales and dolphins are commonly found.

“Oceans are getting busier and noisier... Reducing the noise at the source is clearly a better option than adding additional noise to drive animals away.”

ADDs are also used to keep animals away from places where offshore wind farms are being constructed. But noise from pile driving can itself be reduced by using ‘noise reduction engineering practices’ that are much quieter than conventional pile driving techniques. Reducing the noise at the source is clearly a better option than adding additional noise to drive animals away.

These mitigation measures won’t be carried out as standard without strong policy and legislation. The expert statement produced by the participants of the WDC-hosted workshop lays out some of the steps that ought to be taken to achieve this. One is to enshrine in law the obligation for welfare requirements to be fully accounted for in any human activity that impacts upon them. Another is to require all industries to conduct welfare impact assessments alongside the standard environmental impact assessments they must undertake. As demonstrated by the case of ADDs, such assessments could also need to cover the technologies used to mitigate impacts and not assume that ‘non-lethal’ methods are necessarily harmless.

But as we have seen, the Blue Acceleration and too little oversight is inciting some companies to rush into operations without abiding by the precautionary principle of exploration before exploitation.

Fish in the ocean / Jeremy Wermeille on Unsplash

A way to address this hot-headed resource grabbing and mitigate impacts is to stop looking at individual industries as scientists and policymakers have typically done. Jouffray and his co-authors propose that instead a focus on the multiple claims being made on the ocean – broadly for food, material, and space – ‘makes it possible to account for a wider array of uses, expectations, and societal values attached to the marine environment.’ This, they argue, ‘also helps to anticipate human action before the impacts unfold.’ Claims on the ocean must therefore be properly mapped, and analyses must be made of their interactions and their social and ecological consequences.

Among those ecological consequences are of course the effects of ocean claims on whale and dolphin welfare. The more crowded with industrial activity the oceans become, the more whales and dolphins will have to compete with industry for space, food, and safe environments. As better ocean governance will require cooperation across industries and countries, perhaps one crucial way to safeguard whale and dolphin welfare will be for these animals to be recognised globally as deserving a high level of moral consideration. Some researchers, such as the US philosopher Thomas I. White, argue that the level of intelligence, emotional sophistication, and indeed culture that has been discovered among whales and dolphins in the last few decades make a strong case for considering these animals to possess personhood. Recognising them as persons would mean they are understood to have ‘“moral standing” as individuals,’ as White writes.

This would bring the protections of whales and dolphins closer to the care that was given to the welfare of Benny the beluga whale during his jaunt in the Thames. There is in fact already a Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Whales and Dolphins, written in 2010 by experts including Lori Marino. With the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development kicking off next year and with the blue acceleration multiplying and intensifying threats to the welfare of whales and dolphins, perhaps the rights of these intelligent, complex animals could finally be accepted by the international community, and used to underpin their conservation across the oceans.