The MegaMove consortium, a collaboration of hundreds of scientists partly launched at a KAUST workshop, has assembled one of the most ambitious animal-tracking datasets ever compiled: around 11 million positions from 15,845 individual animals across 121 marine megafauna species, gathered over three decades. Published in Science, the analysis classifies each position as migrating, feeding or reproducing, then overlays the resulting map on existing marine protected areas.
The mismatch is stark. Current protected areas encompass just 7.5 per cent of the ocean space these animals use, and the tracked whales, sharks, turtles and seabirds spend over 85 per cent of their time outside protected boundaries. The study, to which KAUST marine scientist Carlos Duarte contributed, also quantifies the pressures: ship strikes kill an estimated 3,000 great whales annually and are the leading cause of death for whale sharks, while over a third of megafauna species are threatened with extinction.
The authors conclude that the international target of protecting 30 per cent of the oceans by 2030 will not suffice on its own. They call for protected areas to be paired with enforced mitigation, including rerouting shipping away from migration corridors and tightening fishing regulation, with nations acting first within their own exclusive economic zones. The newly mapped hotspots and corridors give policymakers a concrete template for where such measures would matter most.