Photograph by Pia Riverola (Kintzing / Connected Archives)
WORDS BY JASON P. DINH
On October 13, 2012, a team of researchers in Diego Garcia, a small island in the Indian Ocean, stuck a satellite tracker onto a turtle called 61811. The green sea turtle had just laid eggs—females of her species nest on the same beaches where they once emerged from the sand. With some luck, 61811 will return here every few years for the rest of her life to start the cycle anew.
Diego Garcia is surrounded by nearly 640,000 square kilometers of protected waters: the Chagos Archipelago Marine Protected Area (MPA), one of the largest and most controversial marine reserves in the world. For two centuries, turtles here had been exploited for meat, eggs, shells, and oil, but now, the region is a no-take zone.
For many species, an MPA that prohibits fishing and poaching would be a godsend. But for sea turtles, which can traverse entire ocean basins, these researchers thought it may be ineffective.
Turtle 61811 didn’t stay in protected waters for long. Soon after nesting, she journeyed 3,979 kilometers west to her foraging grounds in Somalia. The record-setting trek was “amazing,” the researchers told Science, but it raised concerns for the conservation of migratory species at large. After breaching unprotected territory, sea turtles face myriad threats, including boat noise, abandoned fishing gear, and dying seagrass beds. One MPA—even one of the largest in the world—is insufficient to protect them across their lives.
Turtle 61811’s tale epitomizes why conserving the planet’s thousands of migratory species is such a quandary. Each individual ventures on a grueling odyssey, which, like that word’s ancient Greek origins, presents challenges at every leg: sprawling fishing nets instead of a cyclops, speeding ships rather than sirens. Anthropogenic threats have already driven many species extinct, and those that remain inherently require international cooperation to monitor and protect. Now, the United Nations (U.N.) is on the job.
In a first-of-its-kind report published today on the State of the World’s Migratory Species, the U.N. revealed the alarming status of Earth’s long-distance travelers. Of the 1,189 species protected under the U.N. global treaty for migratory species (the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, or CMS), one in five is threatened with extinction, and 44% have declining populations. Their critical habitats are succumbing to human activity, too: 58% of the world’s monitored sites that are recognized as important for migratory species are facing untenable levels of human pressure, the report found. The numbers are troubling, but the authors insist they know what must be done.
“The idea that we could lose these species is really a wake-up call,” said Amy Fraenkel, CMS Executive Secretary, during a press conference.
“But there is hope if we act now to protect, connect, and restore species populations and their habitats,” added report author Kelly Malsch of the U.N. Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre during the press conference. “The conservation of migratory species—and their future—is in our hands.”
One in five CMS-listed species is threatened with extinction, and 44% have declining populations.
The new report was released at the opening of the 14th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to CMS (CMS COP14), which takes place today through February 17. The meeting, which happens roughly every three years, allows nations, including the 133 that signed CMS, to coordinate international conservation strategies for migratory species and their habitats. Today’s report represents a decade of work that began at CMS COP11 in 2014.
Signatories to CMS are legally required to prohibit the “taking” of species that are most in danger of extinction, listed in the treaty’s Appendix I. This includes killing, hunting, capture, harassment, and more. Parties to the Convention must also conserve these species’ habitat and prevent obstructions to their migration. A larger group of wildlife with “unfavourable conservation status” are designated under Appendix II. Nations, including those that haven’t signed CMS, are encouraged to develop legally binding agreements or nonbinding memoranda of understanding to manage these species.
Still, these protections could be shored up. Fraenkel noted that many species have no protective measures in place. Existing provisions, like the prohibition on killing Appendix I species, are being violated, and enforcement mechanisms are in their infancy, she said. Glaringly, the world’s four largest countries by land area—Russia, Canada, the U.S., and China—are not even CMS signatories, despite each one hosting hundreds of CMS-listed species. While all except Canada have signed at least one memorandum of understanding, none have signed binding agreements.
“CMS has a very important role to play in bringing countries together to take action to conserve these important species,” said Michele Thieme, deputy director of freshwater at the World Wildlife Fund who wasn’t involved with the U.N. report. “We’re very hopeful that the report will spur that kind of action.”
The new report found that 260, or 21.9%, of CMS-listed species are critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable—what the IUCN deems threatened with extinction. That includes 70% of the treaty’s protected reptiles and 97% of its fishes.
“It’s really sobering,” said Emily Cohen, an animal migration biologist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science who wasn’t involved with the report. “I hate to see this report card with a bad grade coming out.”
While the findings were bleak, they didn’t surprise Thieme, who specializes in migratory freshwater fish. “It’s underlying something that we’ve known for a while—which is that fish are in trouble,” Thieme said.
The astronomical percentage of threatened fish species is driven largely by sharks, rays, and sturgeons—the latter of which represent 19 of the 21 CMS-protected freshwater fish and are perhaps the most endangered species group on Earth. Still, a more inclusive list of migratory fishes would indicate similar trends, Thieme said.
She and colleagues penned a 2020 report that assessed 247 migratory freshwater fish species and calculated an average population decline of 76% since 1970. Based on those and other findings, she helped prepare a briefing for CMS COP14 requesting protection consideration for 87 freshwater fish species. At this year’s meeting, experts will deliberate on the protection of two, including the dourada, a catfish that undergoes the longest freshwater fish migration in the world. “Hopefully, that’s the beginning of a new era for recognition and inclusion,” Thieme said.
“They’re just the most exciting species. There’s nothing more amazing than seeing the phenomena of migration… These are the wonders of the world.”
Across the board, two threats emerged as leading pressures on migratory species, according to the new U.N. report. Overexploitation, which includes hunting and accidental bycatch, affects 70% of species with known threats listed by the IUCN. Exploitation is especially pertinent for species that visit predictable sites year after year, like birds and sea turtles. But the greatest pressure the report found was habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation, which threaten about 75% of these species. Migratory species depend on a broad range of connected sites; losing any one can upend an entire migration.
“There is this extremely fragile series of things that have to be in place to protect these species,” said Peter Marra, a conservation ecologist at Georgetown University who was not involved with the report. “We’ve got major problems… Things are not getting easier—things are getting worse.”
Protecting a migratory species across time and space is a tough task. “This is the ultimate conservation challenge,” Cohen said. But their sprawling range and environmental sensitivity underscores the importance of monitoring and protection. “Migratory species are sort of like the global litmus of how we’re doing in conservation… These are the animals that are moving around testing how they can do in all the environments across continents,” she said.
The good news, the report authors say, is that it’s not too late to turn the tide. They propose an action plan that, among other things, includes habitat restoration, combating poaching and bycatch, and stopping climate change. Many efforts are already underway, like international guidelines to reduce light and noise pollution, transboundary wildlife corridors, and task forces to combat poaching. These efforts, the report authors say, must be scaled up and strengthened.
Equally crucial are up-to-date protected species lists under CMS. The report identified 399 species that migrate across national borders, are threatened or near threatened globally on the IUCN Red List, but are not protected by the treaty. An additional 179 species currently under Appendix II might benefit from additional conservation measures. “One would think… those species are not doing so badly, but that’s actually not true,” said Fraenkel.
Fraenkel emphasized how the loss of migratory species could gut the cultures and economies that rely on them: safari-goers seeking out lions or whale watchers cruising offshore to spot the ocean’s giants, for instance. But for Cohen, there’s something larger at play. For her, protecting migratory wildlife means saving one of the most spectacular feats that nature has to offer.
“They’re just the most exciting species. There’s nothing more amazing than seeing the phenomena of migration—whale shark migration or birds flying across the moon at night,” she said. “These are the wonders of the world.”
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A First-of-Its-Kind U.N. Report Sounds Alarm for Migratory Species
