By DÁNICA COTO Associated Press
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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — The tiny Caribbean island of Dominica is creating the world’s first marine protected area for one of earth’s largest animals: the endangered sperm whale.

Nearly 300 square miles (800 square kilometers) of royal blue waters on the western side of the island nation that serve as key nursing and feeding grounds will be designated as a reserve, the government announced Monday.

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“We want to ensure these majestic and highly intelligent animals are safe from harm and continue keeping our waters and our climate healthy,” Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit said in a statement.

Scientists say the reserve not only will protect the animals, but it will also help fight climate change.

Sperm whales defecate near the surface because they shut down non-vital functions when they dive to depths of up to 10,000 feet (3,000 meters). As a result, nutrient-rich poop remains along the ocean surface and creates plankton blooms, which capture carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and drag it to the ocean floor when they die. And sperm whales in Dominica are believed to defecate more than whales elsewhere, said Shane Gero, a whale biologist and founder of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, a research program focused on sperm whales in the eastern Caribbean.

It’s unclear why sperm whales seem to defecate more in Dominica. Gero said it could be they’re eating twice as much, or maybe there’s something particular about the type of squid they’re eating.

“In some respects, sperm whales are fighting climate change on our behalf,” Gero said in an interview.

Less than 500 sperm whales are estimated to live in the waters surrounding Dominica, part of a population that moves along the Lesser Antilles chain, swimming as far south as St. Vincent and north into Guadeloupe. Unlike sperm whales elsewhere in the world, the ones around the eastern Caribbean don’t travel very far, Gero said.

He noted that sperm whales are a matrilineal society, with young males leaving and switching oceans at some point in their lives. As a result, protecting the species is key, especially if few female calves are born, he said.

“One calf being entangled can mean the end of a family,” he said.

Sperm whales can produce a single calf every five to seven years.