Might marine protected areas for mobile megafauna suit their proponents more than the animals? MPAs for magefauna or people?

No doubt about it, conservation is difficult and marine conservation especially so. It is a pursuit frequently characterized by competing interests especially the schism between those seeking to exploit resources (sustainably or otherwise) and those pursuing less tangible goals like biodiversity preservation or concepts of wilderness (Salm et al., 2000; Harwood, 2010). These quests often spawn polarized arguments fuelled by inevitably scant, equivocal or uncertain information. Furthermore, unless a species is brought back from destruction or is extirpated, conservation can also be a battle without clear end. Consequently there is often frustration from slow progress or deadlock and an inevitable hunger for fresh approaches. Could it be that these issues are behind the current fashion for discrete spatial designations such as marine protected areas (MPAs), marine reserves, no-take zones and other variants of a widely applied terrestrial success story (Allison et al., 1998)? Certainly in recent years there have been frequent announcements of new protected areas (large or small, single or so called networked) ranging from voluntary community-led initiatives to statutory national or international designations such as the US Marine Reserves, European SACs and even ocean-scale sanctuaries (Hoyt, 2005; Roff, 2014).