What Does NOAA Have to Do With Saving Marine Wildlife?

0:00 Some of the ocean's most iconic animals would be in even deeper trouble without the quiet work of one agency. So whales, sea turtles, sharks, and coral reefs, and many people do not realize how much NOAA is actually involved. This is the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast, your daily ocean News and conservation podcast. Follow now if you care about what actually helps Marine life, not just what sounds good online. Today we're gonna be talking about how NOAA protects Marine wildlife and its habitats. And I'm talking about this 'cause this is part of my ongoing weekly, I guess topic for NOAA. Really, it's just all about the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, which is an important part of a lot of things.

0:45 Two episodes ago we looked at storms saving, basically. Saving people from storm damage and harm that can happen with hurricanes, tsunamis, flooding, and so forth. Yesterday we looked at how it protects seafood and seafood, the seafood economy in the United States and beyond. Today we're talking about marine wildlife in general and how important it is to save those as a species and what they do with these species. So when species decline, recovery doesn't just happen by itself. We can't just leave a species to say, Hey, they're declining. They'll be fine. We're not gonna monitor them. We're not gonna do anything. We're just gonna continue on with our merry way and do what we've been doing, and we don't have to worry about what happens. But no, it takes science, enforcement, planning, and long-term commitment to help these species.

1:30 NOAA plays a central role in marine species protection in US waters. So that includes the responsibilities under the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, plus habitat Conservation and Sanctuary Management. Take the North Atlantic right whale, for instance. One of the most endangered whales on the planet facing vessel strikes and fishing gear entanglement. NOAA has been deeply involved in monitoring populations for decades, proposing protections, tracking mortalities, and supporting recovery measures. That work can be controversial. It can affect industries and it can trigger political fights. But without intervention, extinction risks rises.

2:10 Sea turtles are another example. NOAA has supported bycatch reduction measures, nesting beach to science, migration tracking and fishery gear changes that reduce accidental captures. Those actions have helped multiple turtle population improve over time even though some of the threats still remain. And speaking of sea turtles, the work that NOAA has contributed among many other conservation organizations and scientists around the world have helped green sea turtles kind of get out of their endangered status of going extinct and into a different status of being less critical when it goes into endanger. So that's an important aspect when we're talking about the effectiveness of this science, of these engagement opportunities, education and policy making from NOAA.

2:57 That's very important. And of course, there are sharks. No supports population science, fisheries regulations for some species, protected area science, and ecosystem monitoring that helps understand predator roll. So we talk about sharks. Those are predators. And habitats matter too. It's not just the fact that the sharks are important, but habitats matter. Marine sanctuaries protect critical ecosystems, cultural sites, reefs, kelp forests and migration corridors that help house all these species that we're talking about today. They're very important species. These places support biodiversity, education, tourism, and research all at once. A lot of these species, they've been considered enemies.

3:38 Movies like Jaws have made great white sharks, the enemy number one in the Ocean. People don't wanna see them. They don't wanna be around them. Obviously you don't wanna be in the water with them. But the fact that this apex predator plays such an important role in ecosystem management in and of itself, not take away humans. They regulate the food web within their area. The fact that back in the ' and '60s and even '70s, they realized that the great white shark population has actually decreased. And then the movie jaws comes out and people are worried about them, but they're like, how do we know where these animals are, where are they? And it triggered funding to find out more about these great white sharks. I talked to Dr. David Ebert, who's a colleague of mine and my co-host on the Beyond Sharks podcast.

4:20 And he's talked about the jaws generation where funding came in for Jaws work, to like to know where these animals are and what they do, and find out as much as possible. And now we know so much more about these amazing and incredible animals that their population has increased more and more because of their protection. So what started off as villains and even though they still may not have that great of a reputation with most people, there are a lot of people out there, a lot more out there that are want to protect them and have protected them. And we've seen an increase in not only the number and the size of these animals, but also their distribution. And of course climate change is helping that. But we're seeing great whites on the East Coast come into Nova Scotia and even further up, which is incredible to see 'cause these animals doing so well and extending their range a lot of the times because there's so much competition 'cause there's so many of those great white sharks within areas.

5:09 So nursery areas in Southern California are being monitored and they're being researched and we're getting more and more actions of those animals. And I think that's really great in that protection. Now, again, we talk about why this matters to people because wildlife protection is not separate from human wellbeing. And again, a lot of times we kind of take ourselves out of the equation of the food web and we realize that we are part of the food web. And we're not at the top of the food web necessarily, but we're involved in this ecosystem. And many communities are economically tied to the living oceans. And I think that's an important aspect to realize. We saw that yesterday. Ecotourism communities are very much tied to the Ocean. Healthy oceans mean people are gonna go out and explore, which means people are going to pay money and support communities in that way.

5:53 I think that's also cool. And also it matters to the Ocean. Species are not just decorations. Predators regulate food webs, as I mentioned before. Grazers maintain habitats like coral reefs and seagrasses. Migratory animals move nutrients across ecosystems like whales and so forth, which is something that's not talked about enough. You lose enough species and a system weakens. They're not as stable. We talk about biodiversity all the time on this podcast. When you have a system like say, a coral reef system and you have this beautiful habitat of these corals, these corals cannot be just sitting there all the time without any kind of maintenance on them. You'll see other parasites that will come on, a disease that will come on the corals eventually.

6:34 If there's a lot of nutrients, you'll see an overgrowth of vegetation that will come like algae that will come on these corals. And these corals can't just remove them on its own. You need grazers. So you have fishes that will come in and they'll start to peck at these corals to make sure that the algae is not widespread over the corals and destroy the coral system ' cause all the corals are die because they're smothered. They can't get the nutrients they need. They can't get the sun that they need to do photosynthesis. And so it could be a hell of a system if your species are not there. If you start taking out those species either through fishing or because of climate changes and things like that, you start to weaken the stability of that habitat and that weakening of the stability will weaken the overall health of the coral system. And so when you have a weak system, you have a weak biodiversity, you have a weak system, you don't get to reap the rewards, let's say.

7:19 So from fishing, from seafood support, from economic support, tourism and so forth. A lot of communities depend on that. We don't realize how much the communities depend on this. So protecting wildlife especially Marine wildlife is very difficult and it's expensive and often politically messy. Not a lot of politicians wanna protect these animals because they don't really see the direct benefits of that, or even the indirect benefits of it. But the alternative is simpler, decline, collapse, and regret. And that's what we want to avoid as much as possible. We've seen in the Gulf of Mexico recently that the US government has reduced the amount of quote unquote hoops that developers like in the oil and gas industry have to go through when they're looking at protecting endangered species. So essentially what happens when a lease is bought, an oil and gas lease is bought in the Gulf of Mexico.

8:04 They have to go through a bunch of regulations. The companies have to go through a bunch of regulations to ensure that they're not harming the Ocean. And it takes time to go through that. It takes a lot of research, it takes money to do that. Not all of the time the businesses are happy to do it because they takes time to go through those studies. They'll pay a hundred to couple hundred thousand dollars, maybe even more to do that. And they'll say it's really expensive and it takes a lot of time too. That's the argument that I hear all the time. We heard in Canada with the pipeline extensions. But we also hear that in the US now with this, and they say it takes too much time to actually build on this. But even if they were allowed to jump through those hoops a lot of the times to go from exploration to drilling, to lease buying and all that kinda stuff, not in that order, but to do all that, that'll take 20 years.

8:47 They have the time. They just don't want to go through it because there's a possibility that they could be harming the Ocean and they don't want people to know that they're gonna be harming the Ocean. They don't care if they harm the Ocean. They still get their money out of each of those wells that they drill. And not even long term, they just want short term. That's all these companies care about. And that's something that we have to prevent. And that's why we go through these regulations that they think about it more. They think about the animals and the fish and all the other communities that depend on the Ocean that are not affected by that. So it's not just the fact that you're gonna help destroy the Ocean. It's the fact that so many other communities in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as around the world, depend on these systems, depend on the coastline for money, for stability, for safety. And when you don't get that and because of one other sector that comes through ' cause they find it takes too long to go through and they can't make their money fast enough, that becomes a real problem.

9:36 So this is why we talk about on these episodes, on this podcast. This is why NOAA is there to help, to help protect these animals, to speak up for these animals that have somebody to speak up for, and to make sure that we're doing things properly as a country. Whether you're in Canada, whether in the US, it doesn't matter. We wanna make sure government agencies really do provide this and NOAAa provides it for the US and that's what you're gonna hear on these episodes of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. We've covered studies from NOAA before, may not have just gone out and mentioned NOAA, but we have covered a lot of sites from amazing scientists that worked at NOAA all their entire life. Careers, which have been phenomenal. So, that's it for today's episode. I'd love to hear from you. Let me know what you think. Go to speak up for slash feedback and let me know how you feel.

10:17 You can leave a voicemail or you can write to me. You can also hit me up on any of my socials, which are in the show notes below. And I wanna thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. Don't forget to follow this podcast if you want to hear tomorrow's episode of more about NOAA. And I wanna thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. Have a great day. We'll talk to you tomorrow and happy conservation.