Environmental Protection: Politics and Outcomes

Abstract

The Antarctic terrestrial ecosystem is marked by limited biological diversity. By contrast the marine ecosystem of the Southern Ocean is teeming with life, including seals, whales and over forty species of birds and more than 200 species of fish. There are four species of Antarctic seal — the crabeater, Weddell, leopard and Ross — and two more species, the Southern fur seal and the Southern elephant seal, which breed in the sub-Antarctic islands and range across the whole Southern Ocean (see Laws, 1983, p. 609; Roberts, 1977, p. 99). The southern oceans are also host to six species of baleen (or filter-feeding) whale — the blue, fin, sei, humpback, minke and southern right whale — and two species of toothed whale — the sperm and killer whales (see Tierney, 1978, p. 8). Forty species of breeding birds, of which penguins are by far the most numerous, inhabit the Antarctic region although only sixteen of them actually breed on the continent itself (Tierney, 1978, p. 8).