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Knowledge gaps put marine mammals at risk

MARINE mammal populations could be at risk from "dangerous gaps in our knowledge" of the oceans.

Scientists at St Andrews University, and the University of Freiburg, Germany, studied more than 1100 estimates of the abundance of whales, dolphins and porpoises in more than 400 surveys from 1975 to 2005.

But they found that while 25% of the world's ocean surface has been surveyed, only 6% has been covered well enough to indicate trends in population size.

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