pacific islands report_NU.indd - Whale and Dolphin Conservation ...

4Checklist of Country-specific CetaceanRecords in the Pacific Islands RegionAlthough a basic overview of the cetacean speciesfound within the Pacific Islands Region has beenexplored (Reeves et al. 1999) country-specific diversityrecords for the Pacific Islands Countries and Territoriesare not well established. The primary reason for therelatively unknown status, geographic distribution andpopulation structure of most cetaceans in the PacificIslands is the lack of directed research that has beenconducted across the region. Therefore this initialexamination of country-specific cetacean diversity inthe region necessarily is a collation of records that havesubsequently been referenced to geographic locationand reliability. It is important to realize that theinformation provided is heavily influenced by uneveneffort both between countries and also over time.Hence, this chapter acts as a checklist of cetaceandiversity rather than an analysis of relative compositionand densities of the cetacean fauna in this region.A concentrated effort was made to collect allreferences relating to cetaceans within the PacificIslands Region. Records were garnered from avariety of sources including peer-reviewed journals,field reports, museum stranding records, whalingship reports, internal records, personal unpublishedsightings and communications, anecdotal reports andnewspaper reports. A particularly useful resourcefor this undertaking was Reeves et al. (1999) in adocument entitled “Marine Mammals in the AreaServed by the South Pacific Regional EnvironmentProgramme (SPREP)”. This review provided substantialsummarization of historical knowledge, unpublishedanecdotal sightings, and museum records. Theinformation within the comprehensive Reeves et al.report has been accepted and transposed to fit withinthe present report. However, the current chapter addsto the Reeves et al. (1999) review in several ways:1. As information gathering for the Reeves et al. reportconcluded in 1996 this chapter incorporates researchand records from this time until the present.2. The South Pacific region focused on by Reeveset al. (1999) represents a portion of the PacificIslands Region yet not all of it. Therefore, a broadergeographic range is covered in this chapter. Theboundaries of the Pacific region are the marineareas under the jurisdiction of each State orTerritory of the Pacific Islands Region, and extendsto the area defined by the Noumea Convention,as the area between the Tropic of Cancer and 60°South latitude and between 130° East longitudeand 120° West longitude. The region stretches over10,000 km from east to west and 5,000 km fromnorth to south, with a combined EEZ of close to 30million km². See Chapter 1 for more details.3. An attempt has been made to qualify each cetaceanrecord included in this chapter. This classificationwas intended to provide a means of indicatingrelative confidence in a given record in terms ofcurrent presence of a particular cetacean specieswithin a given nation’s waters. Three classificationsof records were designated.Class 1 refers to a relatively recent field (orspecimen record) confirmation of the given specieswithin the EEZ of a nation.Class 2 refers to a potential Class 1 record thatis either dated, or may be marginally outside of agiven EEZ.Unconfirmed refers to records that either werenot definitively identified, have not been confirmedby field observations, are from an unobservedstranding event (which therefore may not indicategeographic distribution of the species), or is ananecdotal report that for various reasons may bedifficult to corroborate.Understandably not all records fell easily intothese general characterizations, however, attemptsCURRENT STATE OF KNOWLEDGE OF CETACEAN THREATS, DIVERSITY, AND HABITATS IN THE PACIFIC ISLANDS REGION 35