Marine protected areas for whales, dolphins, and porpoises: a world ...

234 Marine Protected Areas for Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises
MARINE REGION 8: WEST AFRICA
Cetacean habitat in the West African Marine Region includes year-round
extensive inshore and nearshore dolphin populations around the mangroves,
while offshore upwellings support regular seasonal feeding areas for both
baleen and toothed whales. A search for the former breeding grounds of the
North Atlantic right whale around Cintra Bay, Western Sahara (Morocco), in
the mid-1990s, turned up no right whale sightings, but the southern right whales
do come to give birth and raise their calves in the nearshore waters of South
Africa and Namibia. Humpback whales have been identified over the past
decade on the breeding grounds of the Cape Verde Islands. The Canary Islands
have some of the richest and most accessible cetacean fauna in the world, with
at least 26 species of cetaceans, including various beaked whales. Research and
conservation in the Canary Islands have proceeded rapidly in recent years,
following the improved management of the local whale watching industry –
based largely on resident short-finned pilot whales and bottlenose dolphins.
A few species such as the Heaviside’s dolphin and the Atlantic humpbacked
dolphin are found only in this region, while the pygmy right whale is
associated with the waters around South Africa, although it also lives in other
southern hemisphere waters.
In the Canary Islands, the European Commission in December 2001
approved 11 special areas of conservation (SACs) to protect mainly bottlenose
dolphin habitat. Total dolphin habitat protected amounts to 573 mi 2 (1486
km 2 ). In addition, the Natural Marine Park of the Whales in west Tenerife is in
the process of being approved, and there are proposals to turn the waters off
southeast Fuerteventura into a beaked whale and other cetaceans MPA, as well
as one to make all Canary Islands waters into a marine mammal sanctuary.
Other MPAs in the region that offer habitat protection to cetaceans include the
Banc d’Arguin National Park and Biosphere Reserve in Mauritania and the
Saloum Delta National Park and Biosphere Reserve in Senegal, both of which
have resident dolphin populations, as well as the De Hoop, Tsitsikamma and
other MPAs designated under South Africa’s 1998 MPA legislation partly to
protect southern right whale habitat.
The West African Marine Region has three large marine ecosystems (LMEs)
that have been identified: the Canary Current, Guinea Current and Benguela
Current. The region covers the waters of the southeast North Atlantic, the
eastern South Atlantic and a small adjacent portion of the southwestern Indian
Ocean. Politically, it includes 21 countries and 7 territories along the western
and southern coast of Africa from Morocco, at the Strait of Gibraltar, in the
North, to the east coast of South Africa at the border of Mozambique (see
Table 5.1 on p89).
Five main oceanic currents dominate the region:
• From the north, the cool-water Canary Current flows southwest along the
north African coast.