8. Why do you believe that the action will contribute significantly to the conservation of cetaceans?
Drone users are increasingly targeting cetaceans (whales and dolphins) for aerial photography, as they make such spectacular subjects. Unlike most animals, there are legislated minimum approach distances to separate aircraft (including drones) and cetaceans. In NSW, for example, it is illegal to fly within 300 m of a cetacean without a scientific license but UAVs can fly only up to 120 from land. Although this approach distance was appropriate when helicopters and light planes were mostly capturing aerial footage of cetaceans, small electric drones that can safely get much closer to whales and dolphins without disturbing them. While there is clear case for regulatory reform, an appropriate minimum distance for drones to ensure cetacean welfare is currently not known.
Despite extensive legislative protection, dolphins are threaten by multiple anthropogenic stresses, such as fishing interactions, disease transmission, pollution and climate change. Dolphin are also subject to non-lethal stressors, such as intense dolphin watching tours and drone harassment. While in themselves these may appear less severe than lethal impacts (e.g. gillnets), they add to cumulative stress that is triggering cetacean population crashes around the world. In the face of ocean climate change and industrial fishing, it is important we manage local stresses to maximize resilience of dolphin populations into the future. By helping to establish approach distances for drones, our research will directly assist cetacean welfare, contributing to Australia's National and International conservation agreements.
Both humpback and minke whales still face a number of anthropogenic threats from shipping (ship strikes), fisheries (net entanglements) and anthropogenic disturbance (underwater noise, whalewatching etc.), which could affect their population dynamics. By monitoring the body condition of these species and its relationship to reproduction (i.e. calf size and condition), we will improve our understanding of the health of these species and its relationship to population dynamics (reproductive rates). This will allow us to better predict the potential population consequences of disturbance, and further help us tease apart antropogenic effects from environemntal effects. In addition, our project aims to develop non-invasive methods to assess body condition in minke whales (we did this successfully for humpback whales in 2015), which can be used as a viable alternative to lethal sampling (i.e. scientific whaling).