In the direct action against illegal whales slaughtering, two Sea Shepherd Global vessels, the Ocean Warrior and the MV Steve Irwin, departed from Australia’s Southern Operations Base, in 2016, carrying 51 crew members from eight countries. Their goal was to intercept the research fleet, which departed from Japan, and prevent slaughtering. The movement, still, sees the slaughtering as a comercial activity [2][1].

"There is nothing scientific about the slaughter of 333 protected minke whales to determine if populations could sustain a return to commercial whaling as per the 1950s and 60s when other whale populations were hunted to near-extinction", the activists stated [2]. 

The movement underlined that the campaign against the slaughtering   is not about the numbers. For the movement the direct action is a resistance to illegal whaling operation. Furthermore, for the movement, it is about continuing to defend the integrity of the internationally established Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary;  and it is about doing absolutely everything that can possibly be done within the boundaries of limited resources and non-violence against an aggressively violent biodiversity and resources exploitation and degradation -- scientific or otherwise [2]. 

The process of direct action,  that led to the victory of the movement, was not easy however. Namely, scientific whaling slaughters had the advantage of proclaiming themselves as legal while accusing Sea Shepherd of being eco-terrorists. No one was intervening before and it took the so-called scientific research three months to secure their quotas of 935 minke whales, 50 humpback whales and 50 fin whales [2].

However, Sea Shepherd was able to document continued  illegal whaling activities to international public. The evidence was also be made available to the Australian Federal Court. This reinforced the contempt violations by the Australian Federal Court for which Japan has been fined a million Australian dollars [2]. 

Finally, the so-called research project achieved to hunt 333 whales but it took them three times as long to get that quota and cost them many millions of dollars more than it should have if Sea Shepherd had not intertwined  [2].

In other words, the movement with limited resources and a volunteer crew managed to kept the whaling slaughters on the run (at enormous costs for the movement) [1] [2].

NEWREP-A has two main research objectives.

1. Improvements in the precision of biological and ecological information for the application of the Revised Management Procedure (RMP) to the Antarctic minke whales.

2. Investigation of the structure and dynamics of the Antarctic marine ecosystem through building ecosystem models.