ABSTRACT
Who owns the White storks arriving in Germany in spring and in the Sahel in autumn? Who owns the High Seas, its sharks, marine turtles and other highly migratory species in the world’s oceans? The management of animal populations across national jurisdictional boundaries is notoriously challenging and has received growing attention, not least since the 1970s when the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) was first drafted in response to increasing threats to this particular group of species. The reasons for the inherent vulnerability of animals on the move are as multi-fold as this group is taxonomically diverse. Across the animal kingdom we find migrants amongst the insects and other invertebrates, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, both on land and in the sea. Even the largest vertebrates to ever walk on earth, herbivorous sauropod dinosaurs, used to migrate to upland regions during the hotter summer season to sustain their high need for vegetation and water (Fricke, Hencecroth and Hoerner 2011: 513).
