Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Childcare) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Earlier today the parliament was discussing the Environment and Heritage Legislation Amendment (Antarctic Seals and Other Measures) Bill 2006. It is a very important bill and I was glad to hear the discussion of it this morning. What was not discussed, unfortunately, is another very important measure to protect Australia’s and the Antarctic’s seal population. Indeed, Taronga Zoo in Sydney has one of the premier seal protection initiatives in the world, with the Australian Marine Mammal Research Centre and the Great Southern Oceans exhibit at Taronga Zoo, which is currently being rebuilt.

The Australian Marine Mammal Research Centre is a joint research initiative of the Zoological Parks Board and the University of Sydney and has been operating at Taronga for more than 10 years. The particularly special thing about this research centre is the interdisciplinary approach that has been taken by the Marine Mammal Research Centre. It has focused on developing tools which improve our capacity to study the marine environment. The other really special thing about this research centre is the work that it does in educating the public about marine mammals and the Antarctic environment. That will be the focus of the zoo’s new Great Southern Oceans precinct, which is due for completion in 2008.

The Australian Marine Mammal Research Centre is presently conducting two studies of particular interest which focus on Antarctic seals in order to predict climate impacts in the Southern Ocean ecosystem. The first research study is the bioclimatic modelling research project, which is developing ways to predict how changes in ice habitats will impact on three particular species of pack ice seal. The seals, of course, rely on ice for all of their life stages. They never go ashore. They are very dependent on the Antarctic ice environment for their population, and we need to know what is happening to the ice in order to be certain that the seal populations are safe.

With an underwater acoustician from the department of science, the research centre has developed acoustic technology which allows remote surveying of the marine environment over enormous regions, greatly increasing survey capacity. I believe that they can even attract seals under the ice with this technology. Preliminary studies have shown that the old way of determining the seal population by just looking at them—visual survey—was vastly underestimating leopard seal and Ross seal populations, and this acoustic technology will give much more accurate numbers of the seal population and will help us to determine how climate change is impacting those numbers. The obvious impact is that if there is not enough ice then there is nowhere for the seals to give birth, so there are fewer seals. The other very interesting research project is using seal whiskers to trace what the food sources have been for seals in recent years. The whiskers can show for about a four-year period what the food sources of the seals have been. The research centre has had seal whiskers since 1914, so it can look at the sorts of diets that seals have had over that time and trace their development.

The Great Southern Ocean precinct will not just house these scientific laboratories. It will educate up to 1.6 million zoo visitors each year about the precious seals and the Antarctic environment, about how climate change can be reduced by measures that each one of us can take and about how important it is to take these simple measures to reduce our effect on the planet.