PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 29 (UPI) -- Preserving a key 4 percent of the world's oceans could protect vital habitat for most of Earth's marine mammals, U.S. and Mexican researchers say.
Researchers from Stanford University and the National Autonomous University of Mexico say setting aside just nine critical ocean conservation sites would save crucial habitat for most species.
To identify such sites, the researchers overlaid maps of where each marine mammal species is found to reveal locations with the highest "species richness," the highest number of different species, a Stanford release said Monday.
"This is the first time that the global distribution of marine mammal richness has been compiled and presented as a map," co-authors Sandra Pompa and Gerardo Ceballos of NAUM said. "The most surprising and interesting result was that all of the species can be represented in only 20 critical conservation locations that cover at least 10 percent of the species' geographic range."
Preserving just nine of those conservation sites would protect habitat for 84 percent of all marine mammal species on Earth, the researchers said.
The nine sites, just 4 percent of the world's ocean area, are located off the coasts of Baja California in Mexico, eastern Canada, Peru, Argentina, northwestern Africa, South Africa, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, they said.
"It's important to protect marine mammals if you want to keep the ocean's ecosystems functional," study co-author Paul Ehrlich, professor of biology at Stanford, said. "Many of them are top predators and have impacts all the way through the ecosystem. And they're also beautiful and interesting."
