Wander into the Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History and surely every child will be gazing up in wonder at the life size blue whale. Most adults will too for that matter. There's something mystical about a world within our own--different from all we know yet exploding with with biodiversity stranger than anything we might imagine.
And yet despite a collective appreciation of marine mammals, we continue go about harming them in a myriad of ways from destructive fishing practices to industrial pollutants and beyond. In fact, twenty-five marine mammal populations in the US of A are currently classified as either endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and thirty are listed as depleted under the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA). While these policies aim to reduce the greatest threats, we've got a long way to go...
To get readers up to speed, I've outlined five of the most serious over at Correlations...
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