Simone Panigada

Understanding the movements of highly mobile marine species is essential for identifying critical habitats and developing effective conservation measures. Although occasional movements of fin whales ( Balaenoptera physalus ) between the Mediterranean Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean have been reported, the extent to which these movements represent a recurrent component of Mediterranean fin whale ecology remains unclear. Here, we present satellite telemetry tracks from seven fin whales (2022–2025) with five years of supporting evidence from systematic land-based observations (2021–2025) in the western Ibiza Channel to investigate movement patterns, behavior, and habitat use beyond the North-Western Mediterranean Sea. All tracked whales left the Mediterranean Sea passing through the Strait of Gibraltar and subsequently moved northward along the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula, providing direct evidence of cross-basin movements from the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic. Behavioral analyses using two independent movement-modeling approaches identified a common pattern of directed transit followed by area-restricted search (ARS) behavior—commonly associated with foraging—in several Atlantic areas, including waters off the Iberian Peninsula and the Bay of Biscay. The occurrence of prolonged ARS behavior in these areas is consistent with the use of Atlantic feeding habitats. The similarity of movement trajectories across individuals, years, tagging locations, and data streams indicates that seasonal use of Atlantic waters may represent a regular component of the movement ecology of at least some fin whales in the Mediterranean Sea. Given that these movements span multiple jurisdictions and areas of intense maritime activity, conservation measures should consider both important feeding habitats and the migratory routes that connect them.

The Hellenic Trench hosts the highest density of endangered sperm whales in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea and is recognised as an Important Marine Mammal Area (IMMA). This population is exposed to substantial anthropogenic pressures, including vessel strikes, hydrocarbon activities and military exercises. In July 2024, a solitary adult male was equipped with a minimally invasive ARGOS satellite‐linked transmitter southwest of Kefalonia, Greece. Over 57 days, the whale ranged from the Ionian Sea through the Hellenic Trench into the southern and northeastern Aegean Sea. Movement analyses revealed extended periods of localised movements southwest of Kefalonia‐Zakynthos and later in the northeastern Aegean, indicative of potential feeding behaviour, interspersed with phases of directed travel along the Hellenic Trench and across the Cyclades toward the Dodecanese. This is the first satellite track of a male sperm whale in Greece, providing novel insights into habitat use, movement strategies, and previously undocumented transit and residency areas. These findings highlight new key areas for place‐based conservation and demonstrate the value of satellite telemetry for informing targeted management in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Marine megafauna species are affected by a wide range of anthropogenic threats. To evaluate the risk of such threats, species’ vulnerability to each threat must first be determined. We build on the existing threats classification scheme and ranking system of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species by assessing the vulnerability of 256 marine megafauna species to 23 at‐sea threats. The threats we considered included individual fishing gear types, climate‐change‐related subthreats not previously assessed, and threats associated with coastal impacts and maritime disturbances. Our ratings resulted in 70 species having high vulnerability ( v > 0.778 out of 1) to at least 1 threat, primarily drifting longlines, temperature extremes, or fixed gear. These 3 threats were also considered to have the most severe effects (i.e., steepest population declines). Overall, temperature extremes and plastics and other solid waste were rated as affecting the largest proportion of populations. Penguins, pinnipeds, and polar bears had the highest vulnerability to temperature extremes. Bony fishes had the highest vulnerability to drifting longlines and plastics and other solid waste; pelagic cetaceans to 4 maritime disturbance threats; elasmobranchs to 5 fishing threats; and flying birds to drifting longlines and 2 maritime disturbance threats. Sirenians and turtles had the highest vulnerability to at least one threat from all 4 categories. Despite not necessarily having severe effects for most taxonomic groups, temperature extremes were rated among the top threats for all taxa except bony fishes. The vulnerability scores we provide are an important first step in estimating the risk of threats to marine megafauna. Importantly, they help differentiate scope from severity, which is key to identifying threats that should be prioritized for mitigation.

The Pelagos Sanctuary for Mediterranean Marine Mammals is a designated marine protected area in the north-western Mediterranean, encompassing waters between the Côte d’Azur (France), the Ligurian and Tuscan coasts (Italy), and Monaco, extending southward to the northern coastline of Sardinia. This area hosts a diversity of cetacean species. Due to high levels of maritime traffic, the Mediterranean Sea is a global hotspot for whale-vessel collisions. The frequency of both lethal and sub-lethal collisions in the region is considerable, with a general consensus that both direct mortality and long-term population-level effects significantly hinder the recovery and persistence of whale populations.We present SEADETECT, a LIFE programme project aimed at the development of innovative technological solutions to help prevent lethal incidents between cetaceans and ships. Two complementary technical approaches with a combination of different sensors are developed to bring automatic whale awareness onboard vessels in order to avoid collisions.

Human‐caused injuries can have severe consequences for cetaceans, both for the well‐being of individuals and the effects at the population level. Here, we report the first case of a live fin whale in the Mediterranean Sea with completely amputated flukes, a female who suffered two separated incidents: the first one before 1996, when she lost her left lobe, and the second one, in 2019, leading to the severing of the whole tail and finally to presumed death. “Codamozza‐Fluker” was regularly sighted during summer in the North‐Western Mediterranean for 24 years. Entanglement and collision were both hypothesized as potential causes of her injuries. Without flukes, she traveled at least 7000 km across the Mediterranean, despite severe emaciation. Sighting records allowed tracking her from September 2019 to July 2020, providing rare evidence of large‐scale movements within the Mediterranean over almost a year. Her journey, which extended as far as Syria, provides the first evidence of a fin whale from the Ligurian Sea being resighted in the Eastern Basin. This introduces a new perspective on this endangered subpopulation's movement patterns, which are crucial for effective conservation measures. The case gained widespread media attention, representing a dramatic example of usually unnoticed injuries or deaths, and contributed to raising public awareness, essential for driving focused conservation efforts. Her latest accident most likely occurred within the Pelagos Sanctuary for marine mammals, highlighting the need for more effective local protection measures, and underscoring the importance of complementing area‐based conservation efforts with an ecosystem‐based approach.

The Important Marine Mammal Area (IMMA) program was launched in 2016 by the IUCN Marine Mammal Protected Areas Task Force as a response to the conservation crisis in the protection of marine mammals and wider global ocean biodiversity. IMMAs identify discrete portions of habitat, important for one or more marine mammal species, which have the potential to be delineated and managed for conservation. Scientific experts identify IMMAs during regional workshops based on criteria covering critical aspects of marine mammal biology, ecology and population structure.Between 2016-2024, eleven expert workshops - engaging more than 300 experts - have resulted in the identification of 280 IMMAs located in over 100 countries or territories across 80% of the world’s ocean. Candidate IMMAs undergo independent peer review before acceptance and are then disseminated via a searchable database and dedicated online e-Atlas. IMMAs identified to date provide important habitats for 93 of the 135 recognised marine mammal species. Around 69% of IMMAs in the network were identified based on habitat for marine mammal species that are threatened on the IUCN Red List. Approximately 58% of IMMA surface areas occur within Exclusive Economic Zone waters, while 42% fall within areas beyond national jurisdiction.IMMAs are increasingly utilised in environmental impact assessments, marine spatial planning exercises, maritime traffic routing, and international, national, and regional conservation, policy and management initiatives. These include those governed through the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) and Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the design and management of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and the development of MPA networks. The Task Force is working toward completing a global network of IMMAs that will contribute to the Global Biodiversity Framework (Target 3) of protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030 and to the identification of areas to be protected based on the UN BBNJ Treaty.

The current climate change, pollution, and biodiversity crises highlight the urgent need to develop effective conservation measures for wildlife and their habitats. The Mediterranean Sea is home to some of the busiest traffic lanes globally, accounting for approximately 30% of international commercial shipping activity. These high volumes of maritime traffic pose a substantial threat to the resident, endangered sub-population of fin whales, with significant conservation and welfare concerns arising from both lethal and sub-lethal collisions and noise pollution. In 2023, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) designated a Particularly Sensitive Sea Area (PSSA) in the North-Western Mediterranean Sea, following a joint proposal from France, Italy, Monaco, and Spain. This designation acknowledges the significant adverse effects of vessel strikes on the region’s fin and sperm whales, highlighting the need for targeted conservation measures to mitigate these threats. This PSSA encompasses the existing Spanish ‘Cetacean Migration Corridor’ and the ‘Pelagos Sanctuary’, as well as the ‘North-Western Mediterranean Sea, Slope and Canyon System’ Important Marine Mammal Area (IMMA). Substantial understanding of fin whale distribution and habitat use is available for the NW Mediterranean Sea. However, knowledge of the species regional movement ecology (e.g., through the use of biologging technology), critical to support mitigation and management efforts, particularly in relation to vessel-strikes, remains limited. In this context, we assess the habitat use of endangered Mediterranean fin whales in the newly established PSSA. During four field seasons (2021–2024), 15 fin whales were equipped with satellite transmitters – including 11 SPOT and 4 Fastloc GPS tags, all in the LIMPET configuration – during their spring-summer aggregation in the Corso-Liguro-Provençal and the Balearic Basins. Hidden Markov Models (HMM) and Utilization Distributions (UD) were used to identify foraging behavior, revealing that individuals were consistent in their use of seasonal core feeding grounds, many of which occurred in areas with no explicit protected status. Based on the overlap between shipping routes and whale habitat, our research highlights how fin whales do not avoid areas of intense maritime traffic. This, alongside a potentially limited repertoire of avoidance responses to incoming traffic, makes Mediterranean fin whales particularly susceptible to collision risk. Our findings show that the recently established PSSA encompasses the entirety of the movements of the tracked fin whales across the study period, except for one individual who left the study area. These findings underscore the need for a mandatory vessel speed reduction rule to 10-13 knots to be adopted among the Associated Protective Measures (APM), in addition to other recommended voluntary measures already in place within the PSSA.

The North-Western Mediterranean Sea is affected by intense human use (e.g., shipping, fishing, recreation, coastal urbanisation and industries, naval activities) which impacts on marine species survival. Marine mammal ecological and conservation science has made significant progress since the Pelagos Agreement came into force in 2002, and this now can inform better policies to be developed to mitigate such impacts, facilitating the well-being and recovery of Mediterranean marine mammals while allowing for the unavoidable human practices in the area to occur with the smallest possible environmental detriment. Within that context, conservation measures that generate multi-environmental benefits are to be explored and promoted, while also considering socio-economic impacts.Shipping traffic has steadily increased in the Mediterranean over the past 50 years, as well as noise emissions, reported to have doubled between 2014 and 2019 in EU waters. The pressure it causes on marine mammals is assessed and identified at the EU, Barcelona Convention and IMO levels. Some measures, such as reduced vessel speed and others, have also been identified as generating multi-benefits by reducing greenhouse gas, ocean noise emissions and the risk of vessel strikes. Through ACCOBAMS’ support for regionally coordinated research and advocacy, such measures are more effectively promoted and implemented across member states.In addition, the rise in shipping traffic also increased the number of lethal collisions with cetaceans, significantly affecting the endangered fin and sperm whale Mediterranean sub-populations. This led to the recent establishment of the North-Western Mediterranean Particularly Sensitive Sea Area (PSSA) by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), which includes two recognized SPAMIs and MPAs. Associated Protective Measures (APM) include re-routing, reporting measures, and speed reduction and smart technology alerting ships of the presence of cetaceans. The application of these recommendations requires mapping of the critical habitats and fin and sperm whales’ density and fine-scale movements, and an increased effort on the robust assessment of the number of collisions from stranding programs. Robust data will allow to advocate for mandatory speed reduction (up to a maximum speed of 10 knots, following existing recommendations) and rerouting from the highest density areas. Quantitatively monitoring each vessel's compliance with the suggested measures within the PSSA boundaries is an essential step of an effective mitigation effort and will facilitate the robust assessment of the Associated Protective Measures. By promoting a unified, regional response, ACCOBAMS, together with relevant stakeholders, can assist countries to ensure that these protective measures to reduce collision risk are consistently applied and monitored.The Pelagos Sanctuary could be used as a laboratory to test recommendations at a large scale, become a pioneer area for meeting conservation objectives and draw conclusions on their effectiveness and inform decision-making at the IMO, the Barcelona Convention and the EU and its Member States, towards the implementation of the MSFD.

After the near-complete cessation of commercial whaling, ship collisions have emerged as a primary threat to large whales, but knowledge of collision risk is lacking across most of the world’s oceans. We compiled a dataset of 435,000 whale locations to generate global distribution models for four globally ranging species. We then combined >35 billion positions from 176,000 ships to produce a global estimate of whale-ship collision risk. Shipping occurs across 92% of whale ranges, and <7% of risk hotspots contain management strategies to reduce collisions. Full coverage of hotspots could be achieved by expanding management over only 2.6% of the ocean’s surface. These inferences support the continued recovery of large whales against the backdrop of a rapidly growing shipping industry.

In recognizing the need for robust data on the conservation status of cetacean populations in the Mediterranean ecosystem, the Agreement on the Conservation of Cetaceans of the Black Sea, Mediterranean Sea and Contiguous Atlantic Area (ACCOBAMS) proposed a synoptic survey of the entire region, the ACCOBAMS Survey Initiative (hereafter 'ASI'). The ASI was planned as a multi-species survey, collecting data on cetaceans and other large marine vertebrates, such as sea turtles, sharks and rays and marine birds. The survey consisted of an aerial component covering most of the Agreement area, whereas a vesselbased component was implemented in areas expected to be important for deep diving cetaceans. The core aim of the ASI was to estimate the abundance and determine the distribution of cetaceans and other marine megafauna in the Mediterranean and Black seas. Panigada et al. present a summary of the visual line-transect distance sampling aerial surveys, which covered 77% of the Mediterranean Sea to monitor all the relevant Mediterranean habitats and the species therein. The aerial component of the ASI occurred between June and August 2018. Overall, eight planes monitored more than 55,000 km along predetermined transects, from the Gulf of Cadiz to the west to the Israeli coast in the east, over an area of almost 2 million km². Cañadas et al. present a thorough description of summer distributions and densities of cetaceans, underlining a strong longitudinal gradient, from low densities in the east to high densities in the west, a pattern shared by most cetaceans. Paiu et al. present the results of the aerial surveys conducted in the Black Sea in 2019, completed under the umbrella of the ASI, within the framework of the CeNoBS project "Support MSFD implementation in the Black Sea through establishing a regional monitoring system of cetaceans (D1) and noise monitoring (D11) for achieving GES". These aerial surveys yielded the first insights into overall abundance, density and distribution, providing regional baseline values and density maps for all three species of cetacean (Delphinus delphis ponticus, Tursiops truncatus ponticus, Phocoena phocoena relicta) in the Black Sea during the summer months, to be used for the elaboration of effective conservation measures and to address national and international requirements (e.g., achieving and maintaining GES (Good Environmental Status), and national conservation plans for cetaceans). Boisseau et al. summarize the results of ship-based visual and acoustic distance sampling surveys, focusing on those areas known or expected to be important for deep-diving species (sperm whales Physeter macrocephalus and C uv i e r 's beaked whales Ziphius cavirostris), as well as to survey those areas for which it was not possible to carry out aerial surveys. Lerebourg et al. used acoustic data to model habitats of sperm whales to fill knowledge gaps on distribution of the species in the Mediterranean Sea. These models highlighted a higher concentration of sperm whales in the western basin and the Ionian Sea along the Hellenic Trench, than in the eastern basin in summer. DiMatteo et al. analyzed data on marine turtles collected during the ASI effort and combined them with data collected between 2003 and 2018 to estimate distribution and abundance throughout the Mediterranean Sea. The ASI was also an opportunity to develop or refine tools and methodologies. Nivière et al. developed an ad-hoc open-source plugin (PelaSIG) for QGIS 3 to facilitate and standardise the different steps before and after distance sampling surveys. The plug-in comprises tools for survey preparation, automatic data checking, visualisation and presentation of survey effort and sightings and is designed to process aerial datasets collected with the dedicated SAMMOA software, during marine megafauna surveys. The paper analyzed the use of the plug-in with the dataset from the aerial component of the ASI, using a multi-target protocol. Ollier et al. matched visual and acoustic events recorded in a double platform setting during the vessel-based component of the ASI to estimate visual and acoustic detection probabilities for small cetaceans in the Mediterranean Sea. Their results illustrate how passive acoustic monitoring can be used as an independent platform in Mark-Recapture Distance Sampling (MRDS) to estimate the detection probability, highlighting the importance of using dualplatform vessel surveys to estimate detection probability, and improve robustness of abundance estimates. Sol et al. analyzed temporal patterns in acoustic detections of small delphinids in the western Mediterranean. They highlighted a strong diel rhythm with as much as five times more detection during the night than during the day. The authors discussed putative ecological mechanisms underlining these patterns and recommended that these patterns should be considered when estimating dolphin abundance from acoustic detections collected during both day and night. Finally, the ASI allowed the assessment of several anthropogenic stressors that are of major conservation concern for cetaceans and other marine megafauna. Popov et al. overlapped bycatch rates in the Black Sea with robust abundance estimates made during the CeNoBS project, confirming that bycatch poses the most serious threat to harbour porpoises in the Black Sea, and stressing the urgent need for implementation of mitigation measures to reduce bycatch immediately in order to allow the population to survive in the basin. The CeNoBS project also allowed Frassà et al. to investigate the habitat preferences of the three subspecies of cetacean in the Black Sea, with the aim of developing habitat models to estimate the probability of their presence and using the habitat models in supportof environmental status assessments in relation to human stressors, such as shipping noise. The ASI effort also allowed the collection of data on marine debris, which...