Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2024L00930:reg:2:p14
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2024L00930
Segment Type: reg
Provision Reference: reg 2 (pt 14/48)
Character Range: 99752–102662

area may result in loss of the collective memory (i.e., cultural memory) of good breeding areas (Carroll et al. 2015, Harcourt et al. 2019). This may then result in suitable habitat not being utilised or recolonised, particularly if there is no immigration from nearby populations, which could be the case for historically used sites in the eastern population not presently occupied to the same level they were historically before whaling. However, while strong site fidelity occurs within and between years and over decadal time spans (Bannister 2001, Charlton 2017), a small proportion of breeding females have been observed to change the location at which they calve (Watson et al. 2021).
Historic high use areas are where both intensive shore-based whaling effort occurred (based on years of operation and number of stations) and southern right whales occupied the area (Pirzl 2008), with evidence of current use. However, it should be noted that shore-based whaling records may potentially have been incomplete, and consequently the determination of historic high use areas underestimated. Of the four high historic use areas, southern right whales are consistently observed in two of these areas, in southeast South Australia and southwest Victoria. In the two other high historic use areas off the southeast coast of Tasmania and near Eden on the border between Victoria and New South Wales, they are less consistently observed. While there is no current published evidence for consistent re-occupation of areas by the eastern population other than some bays in southwest Victoria, there are increasingly regular records of short‐term use by mother‐calf pairs along the Victorian, Tasmanian, and southern NSW coastline from May to September. In these areas, small but growing numbers of calving and non-calving whales have been observed to regularly aggregate for short periods (days to weeks). These include coastal waters between Binalong Bay to South-east Cape in Tasmania, the Gippsland coast in Victoria (Stamation et al. 2020), and in numerous protected bays generally south of the NSW Central Coast, potentially extending north as far as Port Macquarie (pers comm Andy Marshall 2023).

   2.8.3     Coastal movements
Movements of each population of southern right whales along the Australian coast occur within and between years in areas of coastal connecting habitat, with a high degree of movement having been observed in the western population (Burnell & Bryden 1997, Charlton 2017, Evans et al. 2021, Watson et al. 2021). Movement and interchange between the eastern and western population has also been documented (Burnell 2001, Pirzl et al. 2009, Charlton 2017), with varying percentages of whales sighted in the south‐eastern Australian region also sighted in the south‐western Australian region and vice versa, depending on the datasets used (Evans et al. 2021, Watson et al. 2021).
These