Orca Case Study

To do the SWOT analysis about the ORCA，some strengthens can be found. Firstly,it has a suitable geographic location . ORCA is a British organization whose main purpose is to identify areas where whales and dolphins are vulnerable in North East Atlantic(ORCA 2015). UK is an island country in Western Europe what makes ORCA easy to organize some monitoring activities. Additionally, nowadays, due to News media reports more whale stranding events and condemns for whale hunting, the public has been aware of the importance of protecting marine organism and ocean, so their ideas will easier to spread and attracts more people to join into the organization. To add to this, the ORCA’s sources of funds are not one fold. Apart from the public donation, it obtains the funds by the income of selling souvenirs, organizing some fee-paying courses and activities and membership fees.

Turning to the next point, this organization also has some weaknesses. First of all, the identification of important whale, dolphin habitats is carried out by ORCA’s Marine Mammal Surveyor Teams, which are made up with all volunteers(ORCA 2015), may result in its organizational structure unstable in some extent. Because being different from long-term staffs, volunteers probably have their own jobs and they are not always having free time to take part in all the offshore surveys. However, offshore surveys need volunteers to go on board ferries and cruise ships to conduct regular scientific surveys, recording the species they see. Those works have their own continuity. If team members are unset, it may lead to some problems about their surveys’ cohesion and make their results not accurate. Furthermore, to protect whales and dolphins by identifying areas where they are vulnerable is a global working. The organizations ORCA co-operates with, such as ECMC, DFDS Seaways, whose monitoring areas are also just focused on UK and European water makes it hardly enough for whales and dolphins’ protection(ORCA 2015). Moreover, the cost it uses to maintain its tracking equipment is too high. According to the Wildlifetracking, one tracking device, such as satellite transmitter, will cost 2000 to 4000 USD. And its monitoring works need a large quantity of tracking devices like that and those devices are hard to recycle which take up a large proportion of its funds.

Recommendation:

We recommend ORCA employs some professional long-term workers in it’s marine mammal surveyor team. It is mainly because the offshore surveys is the foundation of its vulnerable area identification, if these critical works are all relying on volunteers, do not have the fixed members, it may have some impacts on its results’ accuracy and reliability. It is meaningful to add the accuracy of the result of offshore surveys which can bring a more precise location of the whales and dolphins vulnerable areas, despite the increase of organization’s economic burden.