That workshop mostly consisted of marine mammal researchers. The agenda was strongly biased towards people doing marine mammal studies, and they want more money to do more research. None of the studies they proposed would prove anything.
The idea of an experiment that I've promoted.... I would not have made that proposal if the data we could collect and have collected were sufficient to answer the questions or could ever be sufficient to answer the questions. The proof is in the pudding: We don't know what the responses would be.
For example, there's a hot topic in ecological research called the ecology of fear. That's studying how the presence of predators can affect the behaviour of their prey and make the prey hide, basically, more of the time, eat less and perform less well than they would if the predators weren't there. They've shown this in various experiments on a small scale. We have no idea at all how that ecology of fear is playing into the dynamics we're seeing out there, yet it certainly is a possibility.
I could list for you a dozen scientific things other than just going out to take more measurements like these clowns recommended. It wouldn't do any good at all; it wouldn't prove anything at all.