Environmental Conservation and Sustainability of Marine Lives

Lecture Reflection
Name
Institutional Affiliation
ESS 3.1
The Film by Alethea Arnaquq-Baril is a production cast of how the seal hunt ban affected the Inuk's making them harbor anger and resentment. Inuit relied on seal meat for nutritional for over thousands of years and used the skin to shield themselves from cold but they did not sell these skins. The government paid wildlife officers to hunt seals and bring the skins to them which they would, in turn, elevate their prices in the global market. The officers would capture seal pups and seal them which were not the way things were done by the Inuit. This caused animal groups to pressure the European government to ban this practice hence affecting the lifestyle of this population.
The ban forced the government to look for alternative sources hence settling on oil exploration but the Inuit were aware of the impact of this process on marine life hence a battle ensued between them and the government until Canada intervened and put a stop too this exploration. The anger of the Inuit is directed to the animal groups who pressured for the ban but ended up putting the lives of other marine animals in danger; they argue that they did not take time to understand what was going on.
ESS 3.2
This lecture looks into the diminished mortality rates of cod stocks and why their recovery has been disrupted at great levels. Some of the reasons discussed are the cod stocks provide or act as food to the right whales of the North Atlantic Ocean and changing the risk of the ocean to the cod stocks (Myer, Hutchings, & Barrowman,1996). The lecture also talks about the various ways in which the future can be made sustainable for these whales despite the changing rates of the ocean risks to their life. It also gives a direction of how scientists have responded to mortality rates of cod stocks which provide food for the whales.
Whales feed by opening their mouths and filtering the water that goes in, use the surfaces and subsurface of the water to look for prey and have a tendency of locating prey even in their vertical positions. Right whales feed on a very small size range of prey thus relying on the ocean to bring food along their way. Migration of whales began in the basin of Roseway where the whales first migrated by 38% followed later by a decline of 80% in their population on the basin. The population of these whales also shifted in the Bay of Fundy ( Kimberly,n.d). These changes occurred due to negative changes on the calves and increased diseases such as skin lesion and fall in skin blubber. There was also a decrease in the stocks of cod which provided nutrients for the whales causing them to shift and abandon the bay.
The discovery of St Gulf of Lawrence led to the deaths of many whales resulting in a total of 35 years and that the amount of human vessels parading the gulf is very high causes breeding for these animals to be a challenge. I agree with the ways they have devised to restore and protect the whale populations. These ways include; avoid fishing when whale season has begun, use of rope fewer tools while fishing, reduce the number of ships and human vessels entering the gulf during this time, reduce the speed of ships, use of fewer traps and tracking of whales to ...