Victoria Travers

This role sees her enter classrooms throughout the Auckland region, talking with children and teachers about the threats the tiny marine mammals face. More importantly, she talks with the children about what they can do to help save them.

Victoria brings a background in marine ecology and education into the classroom. ‘The dolphins are a wonderful animal to engage children – you get an audible “ooooh” when you show them a picture of a dolphin which, alas, I rarely got when I showed a picture of kelp, which is what I did my post-graduate work in.’

It was the dire situation that Maui's are facing that drew Victoria to them – for her they act as as a barometer of the health (or otherwise) of our marine environment.
She’s been in the role since May 2008, and counts herself lucky to have a job that involves talking to school children, teachers and the wider community about how they can take action to save the species. That audience includes lifeguards.

In 2008, after an approach from Victoria, six surf life saving clubs along the North Island’s west coast signed up to look out for Maui’s dolphins as part of WWF-New Zealand’s sightings network.

The information from the 850 lifeguards involved will help WWF-New Zealand’s conservationists build an accurate, up-to-date picture of the dolphins’ distribution. 

Victoria says having the surf life saving clubs on board is wonderful. ‘Having real-time information from the sightings network is very important for our conservation work.  It’s incredibly useful data – when Government makes decisions on which areas of the ocean to protect, the sightings network is one of the sources of information they use.’

Her work with schools and communities gives Victoria hope for the future of Maui’s. ‘I see enough people who, when they find out about the plight of Maui's and Hector’s, sincerely care enough to then take action - often the people I least suspect.  If I didn’t have that hope, I couldn’t do this job.’