A plan proposing to restrain shipping routes across the Panama Canal in order to preserve and protect the Whales has been submitted Friday to the International Maritime Organization by Panama officials. If approved, the changes can be adapted as soon as 2013.
The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's Hector Guzman, who constructed the plan, says that the narrowing of ship routes will spare lives of many of the whales, particularly the humpback whales which inhibit the gulf of Panama. The whales are often reported to be killed by ships beacuse they often cross the broad extensive shipping routes.
Guzman told BBC News, "We recorded 98 interactions between whales and ships during an 11-day period...Just over half of the whales had encounters; one particular whale had 45 encounters in just four days."
The proposal comes a week after a failed bid to make the entire South Atlantic Ocean a sanctuary for whales was knocked down by Norway, Japan, and other whale hunting countries. The proposal was made at the International Whale Commissions annual meeting in Panama City. The measure was proposed particularly under the effort of Jose Truda Palazzo of Cetacean Conservation Center in Brazil as an effort to preserve and save lives of the enormous sea mammals was knocked down by whaling nations such as Japan, Norway and Iceland.
The proposal was recommended in 1999 and would have created a safe zone for whales from the waters between South America and south of the equator in Africa up till the existing sanctuary in the Antarctic. The proposal received 39 positive votes, 21 opposing votes and two abstentions. While more countries supported the idea of the sanctuary, it did not manage to get quorum and thus failed.
Experts are pointing fingers at Japan, which is a big whaling country, for influencing its allies for voting against the proposal.
Palazzo told the Agence-France-Presse "You can't really believe that Nauru or Tuvalu has an interest or has studied the sanctuary. They are voting because Japan tells them to."
Patrick Ramage, Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare's Global Whale Program told the Las Angeles Times, "We are extremely disappointed that the whaling bloc has harpooned the sanctuary proposal despite support of a clear majority ...opposition led by Japan -- a country not even in this region."
Japan, in turn, argues that the sanctuary impedes the socio-cultural environment of whaling countries, and that the measure was completely superfluous like "building a roof on top of a roof," as reported by the L.A. Times.
The International Whaling Commission is an organization set up in 1946 to protect and conserve whales, which are now are endangered species.
