Gary Taylor: Saving maui's dolphin an urgent priority

Only 111 maui's dolphins are estimated to be left in the world. Photo / Glenn Jeffrey

Just off the northern North Island's west coast are some of the most endangered animals on the planet. Only 111 of them are left. They are small, vulnerable and very sociable. They are found only in our waters.

If they were cuddly kakapo, there would be funding and a concerted effort to help them recover from the brink of extinction. But they are dolphins, living in an environment different from ours: the ocean. And what we are doing to them is a disgrace.

Maui's dolphin is a subspecies of hector's dolphin. Hector's dolphins are found mainly in South Island waters and, with 7270 in existence, constitute an endangered species. The much rarer maui's dolphins are classified as critically endangered by the World Conservation Union.

Their population numbers are too small to be sustainable and indeed may be declining. The main reason for their decline is people - specifically, fishers using gill nets and trawling.

Maui's dolphins are creatures of habit. They patrol their defined habitat - the near-coastal waters and harbours - looking for food. They use sound to echo-locate, navigate and communicate with each other.

They are as oblivious to monofilament nets suddenly appearing on their transit route as we would be walking into a pane of glass placed across our walk to work. They get caught, cannot get to the surface to breathe, and drown. These dolphins are supposedly protected in New Zealand waters by our Marine Mammals Protection Act.

That enables the Minister of Conservation to prepare a population management plan for the recovery of a species within a 20-year time horizon.

But no such plan is in place.

Instead, the fate of the dolphins is left to the Minister of Fisheries and his decisions on fishing rules under the Fisheries Act. When the minister tried recently to extend set net and trawling bans to encompass all maui's dolphin habitat, the fishing industry took him to court.

Put simply, gill netting and trawling need to be banned in the dolphins' habitat or the species will become extinct.

They live only 20 to 25 years and are slow to reproduce so every effort is needed to help them recover.

It is unacceptable that we have failed these dolphins to date. Surely the public would support government action to retrieve them from the brink.

Any other developed country having responsibility for the world's rarest marine mammals would have a statutory recovery plan in place to rebuild their numbers and ensure their survival. That should be a top priority for the Conservation Minister, Tim Groser.