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>> Environment Minister - Tony Burke: A couple of years ago at the International Whaling
Commission, Australia, and I was Australia's Environment Minister, launched the Southern
Ocean Research Partnership. It was there to make sure that we started turning the corner,
not merely on conservation, but on the science that could be drawn from conservation. It
was also an opportunity for the conservation nations of the world to show up in lights
that if you want to conduct scientific research into whales you don't need to harpoon them,
chop them up and sell them for food. If you want to conduct scientific research on whales
then you can do it through ordinary scientific methods. The flagship part of that work was
to launch the first fo the programs that Australia would lead under the Southern Ocean Research
Partnership would be research into the Blue whale. The blue whale wins every test that
you could possibly put on whether or not a species is going to be iconic. In terms of
its total numbers and the threat that it has been under it has been right to the brink.
During the whaling years blue whales generally in the order of about 340,000 were slaughtered.
The Antarctic blue whale in the Southern Ocean in the order of about 200,000 of them were
lost during those whaling years up until the mid 80's. It was believed that their numbers
got right down to probably in the order of about 500 individual blue whales. As an iconic
species, we are talking about the largest mammal, the largest animal in the history
of the planet. There was never a dinosaur as large as the blue whale. But then when
there's only 500 in a place as large as the ocean, how do you actually do the most basic
scientific research like finding them, counting the numbers. The work that will begin, and
you've got 11 nations, 10 of the other conservation nations involved in this work, over the next
summer period is quite ground breaking in what's now possible in finding and counting
blue whales.
>> Australian Antarctic Division Chief Scientist - Dr Nick Gales: The scale of removal was
immense and it is probably one of the most spectacular examples of badly managed human
behavior in extracting resources. What we know now is very little. We have had since
1979, the IWC conducted about 25 years of sighting surveys around the Southern Ocean
around Antarctica mainly looking for minke whales but they did encounter blue whales.
The dots on that map on the left show where those blue whales were encountered, but the
numbers are realy small and our level of knowelegde on exactly how many of them there are remains
really poor. So that gives rise to the Antarctic Blue Whale Project, which is, as the Minister
said, the flagship project Southern Ocean Research Partnership in the IWC. It's really
ambitious and we couldn't do this on our own and we couldn't do it without the advancements
we have been able to make in molecular sciences, in survey sciences with statstistics with
micro-processors and tagging techniques to track these animals. This project represents
bringing all of these non-lethal sophisticated scientific tools together to address these
questions. Then with the help of all these other nations come up with an abundance estimate
of how many whales there are, understand the genetics around how these populations around
Antarctic interact and then we can start learning about how they feed, where they feed. And
their vulnerabilities to changes in the Southern Ocean and their vulnerabilities to practices
conducted by humans. So it's really important work.
>> Head of Australian Marine Mammals Centre - Dr Mike Double: I just wanted to show you
this piece of kit here. This is a sonar buoy. IT is originally developed by navy to track
submarines, to locate and track submarines. This part at the bottom here is a hydrophone
and then there's up to 300 metres of cable within here and this part floats at the surface
and transmits a VHF signal back to the vessel. So you deploy this, the hydrophone drops close
to the bottom of the ocean and then it will listen to the whales, it will eavesdrop on
the whales. So we had to trial these before we could deploy them in the Antarctic. And
we did that on two voyages in the Bonny Upwelling of Bass Strait in January and March this year.
So we spent 20 days at sea and we heard some 7000 blue whale calls and we did a total of
32 active follows, where we could repeatedly put out sonar buoys and follow these whales.
Of the 32 follows that we did, we actually found whales 29 times, which is over a 90%
success rate. Often when you find one whale, you find other whales, so although we did
29 successful follows we actually saw 49 different whales.
So given the success of these voyages it really does stand us in good stead for the forthcoming
Antarctic Blue Whale voyage.