Down-under Dolphins

Forest and Bird, Issue 281, 1 August 1996, Page 49

Down-under Dolphins

Eugenie Sage

by Stephen Dawson and Elizabeth Slooten (Canterbury University Press) 1996, 60pp, $19.95 In the late 1980s doctoral students, Slooten and Dawson alerted the newly formed Department of Conservation to the high numbers of Hector’s dolphins drowning in set nets off the Canterbury coast — at least 230 between 1984 and 1988. Their work also showed the vulnerability of this marine dolphin — the world’s smallest and rarest — due to its small population (3,000 to 4,000) and slow reproductive rate. The

Slooten/Dawson research and the advocacy of groups such as Forest and Bird led to the creation of the Banks Peninsula Marine Mammal Sanctuary in 1988. Emerging from more than a decade of research, this book distils the conclusions of a sheaf of published scientific papers by the authors. The text is simple and lively and is liberally illustrated. Ancestry, basic biology, behaviour such as bow riding and jumping, communication, sex and reproduction, and the appropriate human behaviour when near dolphins are explained. Concluding chapters focus on the set-net threat, how to support the conservation of dolphins, as well as describing a day in the life of the two scientists. The recent government review of the marine mammal sanctuary confirmed the status quo rather than extend the sanctuary boundaries. This book confirms the need for

further efforts to prevent the deaths in set nets of these special endemic mammals.