Marine protected area is paying off for Canadian whales

Bottlenose whales off the east coast of Canada are showing signs of recovery two decades after officials designated a marine protected area. Hit hard by commercial whaling in the last century, the Scotian Shelf population of northern bottlenose whales (Hyperoodon ampullatus) is still listed as endangered under Canada’s Species at Risk Act. Canada protected some of the population’s range in 2004 with the establishment of the Gully Marine Protected Area, situated around a deep marine trench the size of the Grand Canyon off the coast of Nova Scotia. Ship traffic and commercial fishing dropped in the area since the designation. Marine conditions have also improved. “At the broadest scale, submarine canyons stir up the oceanography, and that typically translates into more productivity, life and food—good for everything,” study coauthor Hal Whitehead, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, told Mongabay. Bottlenose whales are now recovering, according to decades of observations reported in a recent study.

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